It was a bad year for a number of reasons: I taught Freshman English for the first time in seven years, and it was a struggle. My students – nearly all of them – are addicted to their phones and generally unwilling to read, which made every class a struggle. My administration, which has changed – hang on – eight times in the last five years, changed again, and it was both unexpected and unwelcome, as the principal, who was a friend, had to leave the position for health reasons. But before he left, he asked me to take down a Facebook post for political reasons, which was gross, and he wrote me up for cussing at my class (which write-up was justified, because I did – well, I cussed about them in front of them, I didn’t cuss AT them, strictly speaking. But it deserved some kind of sanction.) and for leaving them unsupervised, which was NOT justified as I had just stepped out into the hall and was right outside the door, as teachers are instructed to do when we want to talk to a student individually. He left before the end of the semester, and a district admin filled in until the new principal started with the new semester: and that guy wrote me an email warning that he would write me up if I didn’t keep my classroom door closed and locked at all times. And on top of all that, Toni’s and my personal lives, specifically in relation to our families, was difficult all year, which made every stressor at school just that much harder to deal with.
And then, this spring, the school cut staff because our enrollment is projected to go down: and one of the first ones laid off was my wife, who had been the advanced art teacher at my school for the last three years, teaching an Honors/AP class and the only life drawing class offered in a public high school in Arizona. (We checked.)
That last one. That’s why I’m here writing.
Not because my wife lost her job: that sucks, it came as a shock and it ruined a very manageable system for our family, because it was very convenient for us to work at the same place, and it worked well for her to teach only part-time, and the income she earned on top of mine was enough to cover our expenses. No, I wanted to write about this because my school cut back their art program. Toni wasn’t the only art teacher, but the full-time art teacher (Who, to be entirely fair, had less seniority than Toni, and so Toni should have been offered her position rather than being cut first – but also Toni would have turned it down, because the full-time art teacher position includes teaching two levels of middle school art, which Toni did for three years the first time she worked at my school, and she will not do it again. But also, they should have offered her the position, if we are using the seniority rules that most schools abide by. But I digress.) will only be teaching Art 1, which is the usual survey art class most people get in high school, where you try a little of this and a little of that, and focus on nothing in particular – it’s a bit ADHD, really. Toni’s classes were the ones that really got into some depth, into the specifics of a form of art – drawing and painting, which are Toni’s specialties. And she knows them better than any high school art teacher: because Toni is a specialist, she doesn’t really want to do clay sculpture or weaving or whatever other art forms most high school art teachers include. But Toni’s students learn more about drawing and painting than they will anywhere outside of college – and in some cases, more than they would in college. Toni changes their way of thinking, their way of perceiving the world: it is her intent, and her students have attested to it. It works. She does it. She teaches them not only how to make art, but how to think like an artist.
My point is, our family’s personal situation aside, and my basic dander being ruffled over those buttheads RIFing my wife, my school had a unique art program. And they cut it. First thing. No, second thing; first they cut the Turkish language classes, which in some ways was even more shocking, as the school was founded by Turkish immigrants who were working in tech jobs here in Tucson, and started a STEM charter school with an international focus so that their kids could have a decent place to learn the STEM skills their engineer parents wanted them to have. The original charter for the schools includes a requirement that Turkish always be a language offered to the students. And they cut that too. But with Turkish, there may have been other reasons: the teacher struggled with the job in ways Toni did not, and the Turkish classes were not terribly popular, which Toni’s classes are; and there are two other languages (Spanish and American Sign Language) offered at the school still. So other than simply recognizing that the administration cut back on both languages and art, and they removed two different unique aspects of the school’s programs, I’m going to focus more on the art that they cut.
Because it was stupid to cut it. And damaging, both to the school and the students. I will note, along those lines, that they did also cut our paraprofessionals, who offer one-on-one assistance to our SPED students, and they cut our wonderful counselor/504 coordinator, who offered emotional and educational support to all of our students as well as to our staff. So they made the school worse in several ways, not just through cutting the arts and languages programs.
Now, of course, cuts had to be made: the enrollment is down for next year, and we get paid per student by the state. We’re losing something over 10% of our total student body next year, according to projections. We have always lost some number of students because we are a small charter school (Just so that everyone is clear on this, charter schools are public schools but we don’t have elected school boards and we don’t have a geographically fixed district to draw students from), and students who want to go to schools with larger sports programs or more elective options usually leave: every one of our high school classes (with some exceptions) is smaller than the one below it – we have fewer seniors than juniors, fewer juniors than sophomores, and fewer sophomores than freshmen. That’s expected. The problem is that we are losing students from every grade: and the puzzling thing is, so is every other public school in Tucson. One of the middling public school districts has had to cut millions of dollars from their budgets because so many students are leaving.
So the obvious question is: where are they going? If public schools were shrinking and charter schools were growing, that would make sense; it would show that parents wanted smaller class sizes for their children, and maybe a specific focus like my schools’ STEM identity. If charter schools were shrinking and public schools were growing, that would mean even more students than before wanted more elective options or maybe more varied social life and so on; also, there is definitely a number of students who are not successful at our school and who transfer to other schools hoping for a different outcome. But that goes both ways, as well; we usually get the ones who “get in trouble” and need to be removed from their friend group. And in Arizona, at least in Tucson, ALL public schools, charter and comprehensive, are shrinking.
So where are those students going?
Some are going to private schools. Some – more, I would guess, though I don’t have data – are going to online schools, or homeschooling. Some are probably just dropping out, though they may be lying about that, telling their prior school or the state that they will be homeschooled or attending online school, and then just going out and getting jobs instead.
And that’s where this all starts getting frightening.
Because this shows that public education is dying.
Probably not everywhere, though I highly doubt Arizona is alone in this; we’re just first, because we have pioneered the Republican party’s long, slow erosion of public education in this state, and we have pushed it a little farther and a little faster. Arizona has been in the bottom three for both test scores and teacher compensation for several years; now we are seeing the payoff. Especially when you include the fact that our business-friendly – sorry, make that business-sycophantic – state has cut taxes to the bare minimum and below (A trend exacerbated by the number of “snowbirds,” retired people from cold states who winter in Arizona and sometimes declare residency here and vote here, where they obsessively and virulently oppose all taxes, because they don’t need much from the state in the way of services and damned if they’re going to pay for those friggin locals), while also allowing families to create “Empowerment Scholarship Accounts,” which allow them to pull funding from public schools and spend their tax dollars on their children’s private schooling. So now we can see why private school enrollments are going up: because it is a well-established principle that our capitalist society believes that something you pay for is higher quality than something you get for free, so paying tuition at a private school clearly means their kids are getting a better education.
I mean, maybe not one with advanced art programs.
But now we don’t have that at our charter school, either, so. Might as well send my kids to that big Catholic school. You know they can maintain discipline. And they have a pretty good football team, too.
Those same ESAs help explain online schooling, as well, and I suspect there are at least some parents who take the money and make some idle gesture towards homeschooling – probably while telling their lazy kid to go get a job. Though honestly, I would guess most people who go the homeschooling route, or the drop-out-and-go-to-work route, either don’t know about the ESAs and how to access them or don’t care, and the money probably just stays in the system. What money there is in the system. Which really ain’t enough, even without families pulling it along with their kids, as though the only reason we pay taxes for schools is to educate only our own children.
Funny how those ESAs aren’t offering rebates to childless couples like myself and my wife. It’s almost like it’s intended to harm public schools, not to be “fair” to taxpayers in some way. Oh wait, that’s right: it is.
This is part of the long-term Republican project. You can see it happening faster, and a thousand times clumsier and stupider, in Trump’s attempted destruction of universities, with Harvard currently acting as the breakwater. Public education is bad for Republicans, you see, in a number of ways: first because educated citizens are harder to fool, and when your entire mission statement as a political party is to use cultural wedge issues to get elected, and then bait-and-switch so you can cut regulations and taxes for corporations and the wealthy, you need citizens who are easy to fool, or else you’ll never get re-elected. Secondly, public education tends to teach people how to question, how to reason, and how to research for themselves; all of which makes it harder to gin up a successful level of fear and anger with wedge issues. Someone who can Google competently, for instance, is far less likely to vote for politicians who promise to keep trans athletes out of sports: maybe because the competent Googler could find out just how miniscule is the population of trans athletes in sports, or one could discover that trans athletes do not have a persistent advantage in sports once they start hormone therapy, or that the divisions we have used in sports for the last century or so are not as black and white as the GOP would have us believe, as human biology and sex categories are neither simple nor clear-cut. And lastly, modern education, especially taken to the university level, tends to reduce people’s adherence to dogma, and to increase people’s empathy, not least because universities are where people meet other people who don’t look or talk or act or believe just like them. It’s easy to keep a childhood faith when you live in the same town you grew up in, where everyone goes to the same church every Sunday; it’s much harder when you go to college in a different state, and not only don’t have the exact same denomination of Christianity there, but also start meeting people from other nations, people who are Muslim, or Hindu, or Buddhist, or Jewish, or atheist. Especially when you learn real science, or history.
Oh: and then there’s the fact that uneducated people make more easily exploitable workers. Right? Because uneducated people in the Appalachians are always going to be coal miners, and uneducated people in the South are always going to be sharecroppers and farmworkers, and uneducated people everywhere are going to cling to the “good” jobs they can get – by which I mean being sexually harassed at Wal-Mart or having to piss in a bottle in an Amazon warehouse – because they know they won’t be able to find anything better. So they’ll absorb wage freezes and benefit cuts, they’ll live with reduced hours and a lack of promotions. They’ll (generally) oppose unions, because they don’t want to see their paycheck go down even as little as unions dues would take; and they’ll immediately and violently turn on darker-skinned immigrants who are “taking our jobs.” All of which serves the desires of corporations and the wealthy, and therefore the primary mission of the Republican party.
So for all of those reasons, the Republican party wants to destroy public education. I am now grown cynical enough to think that the Democratic party is on board with at least some of this project – because this has been going on for decades, and the Democrats haven’t made any of the structural changes that would be necessary to solve the problems, primarily a national school funding scheme and a national curriculum and free college tuition – but at least Democrats want to appear to support education, and so they don’t pull shit like trying to close Harvard or removing evolution from school curriculum.
But they’ll sure as shit agree to cut art. Which is why my wife got cut.
To be clear, the decision to cut the advanced art teacher specifically came from the district administration. As I said above, they have cut everything they could that makes the school a better place for students; because they district administration, unsurprisingly, are Republicans. That’s an assumption, but it’s not exactly a leap, based on every interaction I have ever had with said administrators. But just like when Republicans in Washington cut something – SNAP benefits, for instance – that Democrats support pro forma but not with any sincerity, there is some noise made about opposing the GOP, and then about reversing the cuts; but all they actually do is use those cuts as their own wedge issue, to get Democratic voters to vote for whichever corporate stooge the party wants to install in power, who will then make life easier for their wealthy donors, while making it harder for their poor voters; because even though Joe Biden didn’t create a national minimum wage, or create a national system of health care coverage, or tax the wealthy in any kind of rational way, or cut the military and end all wars and the American network of international political oppression – hey, at least he’s not Donald Trump, amirite?
My friends and I have joked – bitterly, and often humorlessly – that our administration is DOGEing our school: making stupid, short-sighted cuts that are going to do far more damage to the entire endeavor than they are worth in terms of money saved, and with reckless and almost gleeful disregard for the lives they are affecting with those cuts. But while I guess the Democrats in Washington are trying to oppose Elon Musk and the DOGE cuts, I didn’t see any real opposition from any of our administration to the cuts made at our school. Regret, sure; I saw that. Wishes that a way could be found to avoid the cuts, and plenty of blame for those mean ol’ district administrators who actually determined who would be RIFed. But no action. And not that I expect anyone to throw themselves on their sword and quit so that my wife could keep her job – after all, I didn’t do that (though I recognize that such a self-sacrifice would actually be self-defeating in our particular case) – but a friend of mine pointed out that all of the teachers were given a raise this year; not a substantial one, but several hundred dollars – and if you took $500 of that raise from all of the staff members at the school, that would basically cover my wife’s salary. So if my friend the teacher could find that money, I don’t really believe the administration couldn’t. No: they didn’t try.
Because the school administrators didn’t really disagree with cutting the advanced art teacher.
They did not cut the core teachers, of course. They DEFINITELY did not cut the STEM teachers – sorry, the STM teachers, as we do not currently have an Engineering program. They did cut the administration a few years back, when they combined the principal positions at the elementary school and the middle-high into one principal of both schools (another DOGEing, because it was a stupid cut that has caused nothing but inefficiency and problems at both schools), but they didn’t cut it more to meet this most recent budget shortfall. Even though administrators get paid two to four times as much as teachers (and an even greater multiple for my wife, who was part-time, or the paraprofessionals, who were paid less per hour).
They may have regretted RIfing my wife, because she is a wonderful person and a wonderful teacher: but on the inside, they agreed that cutting advanced art was the right thing to do. And cutting the third (and least-popular) foreign language. And cutting the staff who only serve some, but not all, of the students.
Because those cuts make sense, right? I mean, the people who serve the largest number of students are clearly the most valuable. And come on: it’s not like art is that important. We all know what really matters, what schools have to focus on: jobs. And STEM is where the jobs are, the good jobs, the career jobs like computer programmers and software engineers. Aerospace engineers. Mechanical engineers.
You know: the guys who work for Elon Musk.
I could go off on this topic for a very long time. I already have, frequently. Schools should not be focused on jobs: the task of education is to make life better for our students, and thereby to make the world better for all of us; and nobody is actually served by having students go into engineering. Sure, it’s a career; but is it actually a satisfying one? One that would serve to define the identity of our students, over and above any other element, all of which other elements we almost completely ignore? Job preparation, inasmuch as it is an appropriate topic for schools, should not be focused on STEM white collar jobs like engineers or accountants or science teachers or researchers: the real need in this country, and the real area of potential employment, is in the trades. And I would argue our students would be FAR better served by becoming trained mechanics, who would make as much or more as many engineers and scientific researchers – who would go home and read philosophy and compose classical music and act in community theater and, most importantly, PAY ATTENTION TO FUCKING POLITICS IN THIS WILD SHITSTORM OF PRIVATELY FUNDED GASLIGHTING WE PRETEND IS A NATION.
But school shouldn’t be focused on job preparation, not at the K-12 level. We need to do three things: give students the basic tools they need to succeed in ANY serious endeavor in their life, primarily the ability to think critically and to learn on their own anything they have not already learned; teach them to be decent fucking human beings; and expose them to as many different kinds of human activity, as many different modes of thought, as possible. We particularly need to focus on the exactly the ones they will not use at work every day of their lives: because if we teach them nothing but how to work, what will they do during their off hours?
You know what they will do: the same thing most of them do now, the same thing that too many of us do.
Nothing.
We should teach them how to make art (And music, and poetry, and everything else that we include in the “arts”), precisely because it is not the thing they will do 9-5 Monday through Friday throughout their lives. (And also, even at a small charter STEM school, let’s not pretend there are not at least a few students there who WILL make art into the thing they do 9-5, Monday through Friday, throughout their lives; and let’s be clear that the more people we can help move into that kind of life, the better off we will all be.) It is the thing they should do to express themselves in ways they cannot, during their 9-5 jobs, Monday through Friday, throughout their lives. It is the thing they should do to claim time and mental energy for themselves, even when they willingly sacrifice all of their free time, money, and energy to their future children. Because art is one of the most personal things we can do, and everybody needs personal time, and everybody needs personal expression.
Because art is fundamental. It is fundamentally something that makes us human: it defines us as humans, because no other animals make it in quite the way we do. Art allows us to express what is inside us that cannot be expressed, which forces us to find ways to express it: and if no ways exist, it forces us to create ways to express it, because that voice inside cannot be silenced once it is ever allowed to speak. Art makes us more human, because it forces us to think in ways we normally do not, and that adaptable, imaginative projection outside of our habitual thought patterns is our primary survival strategy, our defining trait, whether we are hunting mammoths or trying to survive in the rat race of society. If we intend art to be shared with others, then it forces us to think about how others think, and how we can communicate and affect other humans; and that improves our empathy and our cooperation, and it opposes our desire to exploit and oppress each other, because you can’t exploit and oppress people you see as your equals, as your fellows: as other people who can appreciate art as you do.
That’s why billionaires are never artists.
The job of schools should not be to channel students into specific pathways; that is limiting them, it is oppressing them – it is lessening them. Art expands us: it frees us, and ennobles us. It makes us greater. That’s why students love it, because they are dying to be more than they have been allowed to be: because they want, more than anything, to discover themselves and express themselves.
Are they supposed to do that in chemistry class? In computer programming class? In math?
My school does not understand what the task of a school is. Which means they will fail at their actual task, while they are pursuing, single-mindedly, the wrong task. And they will fail at that, too. And they will never understand why.
Because they, too, are not artists.
(I’ve been listening to this next one for more than thirty years, and always loved it, and never knew what it was about — because I never bent my mind in this particular direction. Now I love it even more. The audio here isn’t the best version, but it goes SO well with the image.)
And this one’s ridiculous, but — necessary. Entirely necessary.
it may seem at times like I am. I get pretty mad about politics, and I say some aggressive and accusatory things, and also some pretty damn insulting things. We disagree, very strongly, about a number of issues; and you may see some of my opinions as representing a threat.
For instance, you see Donald Trump as the best choice for the next President. I see him as an orange fascist, a shit-flinging gibbon, who may be a threat to this country’s continued existence; though I admit, Trump’s not actually the threat; it’s the people who come crowding in with him, who, while we’re all staring at the shit-gibbon, are sneaking around in the shadows trying to make our lives worse so they can gain more of what they already have, wealth and power and the protective bubble of privilege. I don’t understand why you can’t see the threat of those people behind Trump. Though I understand why you’re staring at Trump: we all are. I went to the San Diego Zoo when I was a kid and watched a chimp pee in its own mouth. We like watching primates fling excrement. It’s wild.
I know that you think Kamala is the threat to our country; or, even more likely, you see her the same way I see Trump: you think she is a low-IQ failure, a Communist/Marxist liar who got her start in politics by spreading her legs for Willie Brown, and who never even won the nomination, just stepped in when Joe dropped out, conveniently for Kamala too late for the DNC to run a new primary but not too late for her to take the money he raised; and you think she is mainly a distraction whose job it is to open the door for those same shady characters I mentioned before, who, you think, will strip away our freedoms and the things that make us who we are, that make us the greatest country on Earth.
You worry about what she’s going to do to the economy, and how that will affect the people of this country.
I worry about what he’s going to do to the people of this country while we’re all focusing on the economy.
So, we disagree. Strongly. Often.
But we’re not enemies.
Neither one of us is trying to destroy the country, though we both accuse each other of doing exactly that. I think the threats you see, the things you believe will destroy the country, are absurd non-issues — like preventing trans people from playing sports — and I can’t understand why you don’t focus on the real threats that I see — like climate change. And yes, you guessed it: you can’t fathom why I believe in these things that are barely even real, like climate change, and why I ignore the moral collapse of this country, caused by the rise of DEI and drag queen story hour.
I know that the issue of trans rights is not the biggest issue on your mind, I know that it is the economy, immigration, and crime, in that order; I’m trying to show the starkest differences between us — because people on my side are also concerned about the economy and about immigration in ways I personally don’t agree with. So look on the bright side: you already won both of those arguments, as you won the argument about defunding the police. Whoever gets into office, Trump or Harris, Democrats or Republicans, they will cut taxes (though they shouldn’t, they should raise taxes on corporations and use it to fund Medicare for all, which will then save us more money and, more importantly, more headache than any tax cut ever could — but I also recognize that you think this is socialism gone wild, and you can’t believe I would ever trust the government to do anything important like provide real health care to real people; and I can’t believe you would trust corporations to do it instead of the government — and here we are.), and they will definitely pass that hard-on-immigration bill that the Dems handed the Republicans before Donald Trump told them not to pass it. He’s been taking shots for months, now, about that bill, so you better believe he would pass that same damn bill — except with the wall stuck in there somewhere. So you will get a tougher stance on immigration, and you will get a tax cut, and you will get a better economy (Because the economy during any presidency is largely built by the one before, so whoever wins this election will be hailed as a brilliant economic president because of the work that Biden has done for the last four years. But we can disagree on that, too.). One of the other places we disagree is trans rights, and that one I think is still up in the air; that’s why I used it as an example. I could have picked abortion: but I don’t think we actually disagree on that, not substantively.
I’m explaining this because I don’t want you to think I’m trying to paint you in a terrible way by talking about trans people playing sports or reading to children: I am not. I disagree with you. (If you are a trans person, or an ally and a supporter of trans rights as I am, and you think I am cozying up to people who want to remove your right to exist, hold on. Trust me. Read on to the end. I am not your enemy, either. [I’m just going to go ahead and assume that anyone who actually is trans is not on the Trump side politically. Not really.]) I do not think you, whom I disagree with politically, are my enemy.
I would like you to recognize the same thing about me.
Let’s talk about our disagreements a little more, and see if you can see this my way.
What makes someone your enemy? For me, it boils down to one thing: your enemy intends you harm. They wish to harm you. People who are not our enemies may (and often do) harm us, but they don’t intend it; that’s the difference. Anyone who intends you harm is your enemy.
So look at where we disagree. Start with immigration, because I don’t mean to ignore what many people think is a very serious issue. Here’s my opinion on it: there are too many illegal immigrants coming into this country.
Ha. Didn’t expect that, did you? Want me to really blow your mind? I’m in favor of the Second Amendment, too.
Where we disagree is what should be done about illegal immigration. I do not think illegal immigrants are bad people. I am tempted to explain that position by saying that I am not a racist, because I think a LOT of people who oppose illegal immigration hold that position because they are racist; but not everyone does, by any means. Many people oppose illegal immigration because it is illegal; many people oppose it because they think our country doesn’t have the room or the resources to support countless immigrants, and priority should be given to those who come here legally. I disagree with the first argument because laws can be changed: what matters to me is harm, not the fact of a law prohibiting specific behavior. I talk to my students about laws and morality all the time, and every single one of them thinks that some laws should be broken when the law is bad or the need is severe or the cause is righteous; I presume we agree on that, as well. I don’t like holding one position in one context and then changing it in another context; that is hypocrisy. So the issue is, if illegal immigrants are doing harm, their actions should be illegal, and they should be stopped; but if they are not doing harm, then it doesn’t matter that their actions are illegal: harmless actions that are illegal imply the laws should be changed, not that the actions and the people are bad somehow despite the lack of harm.
The harm illegal immigrants may be doing is taking limited resources. And as I said: I think there are too many illegal immigrants. (I kind of think there are too many people in this country, period, but then I don’t like people, so I’m not going to pay much attention to that thought of mine.) I will only say that illegal immigrants may be taking limited resources because it isn’t clear to me that illegal immigrants are the problem: they are emphatically not the cause of inflation or the housing crisis. But it is possible they are taking too many limited resources, and if so that should stop: one way would be if they should be reduced in number.
Here’s how I think we could do that, if it is the right thing to do: work permits and the right to migrate freely across the border, in either direction, for employment. Doing that would eliminate as an area of concern all of the people who immigrate and reside permanently in the US simply for economic reasons: because they could travel here, work, and then go back home with their families for vacations or when they have enough money. They wouldn’t bring their families here, because they would only come to work and send money home. Most people don’t want to move their family to a whole new country just for a job: they do it because if someone comes to the US for a job, they can’t ever go back, because then they could never return to work more. People used to cross the border to work when the agricultural season called for more workers, and then return to their native country when the season ended. We are the ones who stopped that, and it was stupid, and it caused millions of people to immigrate here with their families, permanently, reluctantly, because they had no economic opportunities in their home country and they didn’t want to be separated from their families forever. But go to the U.S. alone, just to work for a couple of months for picking season? No big deal. And then the only people who migrate here permanently would be those actually seeking asylum, seeking an entirely new life: a MUCH smaller number.
So. That’s my view on illegal immigration. I think immigration does no harm when it is handled reasonably; because of that, I think handling it reasonably is the best thing to do. Not build walls, not deport people, not militarize the border. (We are not, by the way, talking about fentanyl trafficking or human trafficking: one of the ways that we get twisted in politics is by conflating multiple issues that should be considered separately. This is just the immigration discussion.) Work permits and freedom to cross for work.
Maybe you still disagree with me. Maybe you think illegal immigration is illegal and so there should be a penalty involved, because breaking a rule is in itself harmful; okay. Maybe you think that immigrants with work permits would still take jobs that should go to Americans; okay.
Can you see that, even if you hold these opinions, or some other opinion that makes you disagree with my idea — can you see that I don’t intend you any harm? That I don’t mean to harm anyone? I want to make it easier to separate those migrants who want to work and then leave, from those immigrants who want to come here permanently, and I want to make it easier for both to get what they want. I believe that will do the most to decrease harm. (And, not coincidentally, it will reduce the harm done through human trafficking and drug smuggling, because much of that is done through exploitation of desperate people, and if we reduce desperation we reduce exploitation. But this is just the immigration discussion. I just want you to know I’m not ignoring the other problems.) That’s my full intent: and so even if you think I’m missing a critical concern of yours with my solution, I’m not planning anything that is intended to cause you harm. Or to cause anyone harm, but we’re talking about you.
That’s why I’m not your enemy.
Want to do another one? Take climate change. You may oppose the Green New Deal because you think that it will make everything too expensive, and that climate change can’t be affected by making you buy an electric car. You may think that Democratic politicians are using the Green New Deal to give kickbacks to the shady people standing behind them (Though if you do, you are ignoring that one of the biggest recipients of sweetheart environmental laws and policies is Elon Musk, who is not a friend to Democrats.), and you may think that electric cars suck and you don’t ever want to own one. (You may tell yourself it’s because EVs don’t have the range, or that the batteries are dangerous and lithium mining is toxic, or that the power to charge them comes from fossil fuels used to generate power in the first place — but it’s really because EVs don’t make the cool sounds that gas cars do, and you know it. Right, JB?)
I do not believe in a Green New Deal. I think it is a political statement that is now toxic. I wish it weren’t, because I believe in what it represents; but I don’t need the statement, I just want the results. I believe the government should support and encourage the US to move towards a greener economy and a greener infrastructure. I do not want Democrats giving kickbacks or sweetheart deals to their corporate cronies; they are bad at picking them, because they picked freaking Musk and made him the richest man on Earth, and he then fucked up Twitter. I really liked Twitter, so now I hold a grudge. (Mostly against Musk, who sucks for a plethora of reasons.) I believe the government has a role in educating the public, and especially in making sure that the corporations which profit from causing climate change do not get to lie about climate change, as all of the oil and gas companies have been doing for generations now. I admit I think that EVs are better and cooler than gas cars, and specifically because they don’t make the same noises that gas cars do.
It’s okay if we’re enemies on that score.
But again: can you see how I don’t intend to cause you harm? We may have different ideas of what should be done, and how it should be done. I want education. I want encouragement and support, but I want the change to come from the people and the companies of this country, not to be imposed by the government. I want that because government imposition of changes so vast and momentous doesn’t work: and I really think our actions on climate change need to work, and they need to work now. But I’ll bet you anything that we could find a reasonable compromise on the specifics of this issue.
Because I am not your enemy.
Go down the line: you will find the same thing, again and again. I hear pundits and people on both sides say that we are all Americans and we are not that different; I don’t actually agree, I think we are that different. I think we disagree on a whole lot of stuff. But I don’t think we are enemies, because I don’t think we intend each other harm. I don’t think most people intend anyone harm, other than those they see as enemies. I don’t think people who want to deport illegal immigrants want to harm those people, I think they just want to protect this country and they think immigrants are harming the US, and that deportation (and a wall) are the best way to prevent that harm. I know that people who want to impose EV mandates and so on are not intending any harm for those who might get affected; they want to prevent the much greater harm of the onrushing environmental collapse. Talk to citizens who support the idea of a Green New Deal about something like subsidies for those who can’t afford to buy an electric car, to make it possible to switch to an EV, and I guarantee they’ll agree immediately; and if you think that’s socialism, well. Tell me who it harms, and how.
You know what made me realize this? It’s abortion. Over 60% of this country’s citizens support abortion rights. That’s more than all of the people in either party, Democrat or Republican. The people I sometimes think of as white supremacists, the people I sometimes think of as religious fanatics (Don’t blame me for thinking that, you guys have Mark Robinson on your side.) — large proportions of them, of you, support abortion rights. And yet there are whole states — which may not have 60% support for abortion rights, but sure as hell have more than 0, which is the number of abortions some states seem to want to allow — trying to ban abortion entirely.
Even those people, most of them, don’t intend harm. They are trying to prevent harm. I think, vehemently, that they are wrong, that they are causing more harm than they are preventing; but I can have that debate with them. And other than the fanatics who actually want to murder people, I think they would be willing to have the discussion with me, too. Because we’re not enemies.
Now: let me say that there are people who intend harm. There are people who oppose immigration because they are racist; they want to militarize the border because they want people to die trying to cross into the US; they want there to be camps built to hold immigrants because they want immigrants to suffer and die. Those people are my enemies. As I think they are yours. There are people who want to prevent trans athletes from playing on teams with their identified gender because those people hate trans people, and think trans people shouldn’t exist. Those people intend harm to trans people: therefore they are my enemies. But I don’t think that’s you, either. I think most people who oppose trans rights think that it’s fine for trans people to exist; they think trans people shouldn’t play on sports teams, and they think trans people shouldn’t be around children. I disagree with those ideas — but I don’t think the people who hold them intend harm. I think those ideas actually do cause harm, quite severe harm; but I don’t think it’s intentional harm. Where it is intentional harm, where people think trans people — or those they mistake for trans people, like drag performers — should be killed? Those people are my enemies. And they should be yours. Murderers, even would-be murderers, do not get a place in the debate.
But I really don’t think that most people want to commit murder. And I think if you don’t want to kill people, we can talk.
So this, I think, is how we should think about this going forward. I disagree with you, a lot, and I will fight you, tooth and nail, over political points — but not literally, because I do not intend you harm, and you do not intend me harm. We are all Americans, even though we are very different. We are not enemies.
But you know who is my enemy?
People who try to convince you that I am your enemy. People who say that I am, intentionally, destroying our country, which I love dearly. People who say that I should be destroyed, that I should be jailed, or killed, for my beliefs and my political ideas.
So understand this: I don’t hate people who vote for Donald Trump — though I don’t like you, either. But I don’t think that most of you are my enemies. Some are: the racists are, and the anti-trans bigots, and the ones who want people to suffer and die because they disagree politically with Trump and his ilk. Donald Trump, however, is my enemy: because by trying to make you think that I am your enemy, he intends me harm. If you think the same thing about Kamala Harris, then I accept that she is your enemy — though I doubt you think that unless you think that all Democrats are out to kill all Republicans, and if you think that, you’re probably my enemy already. Trump is Kamala Harris’s enemy, and so she says things about him you wouldn’t say about people who aren’t your enemy: and he deserves them.
Because he is the enemy.
You’re not.
So if my enemy wins this election, I’m going to oppose him, and I’m going to be fighting those who supported him because he is my enemy, and I think he intends harm. But then after he is gone — and even if he wins this election, he will not destroy this country, because he has too many enemies and not enough allies — we will need to come back together, and hopefully find a new set of leaders to elect who do not tell any of us that we are each other’s enemies. Hopefully that type will never rise again.
Hopefully it won’t be you.
But I don’t think it will. Because we’re not enemies.
I watched the Presidential debate on CNN last Thursday, and I wish I hadn’t. Or rather, I wish I hadn’t seen what I saw, because I wish it hadn’t happened the way that it did. I wish there hadn’t been a debate for me to watch, because it did not go well for my side. Or, even better, I wish the sides were different: I wish the debate had featured entirely different candidates, giving entirely different answers to the questions — which probably should have been moderated by entirely different journalists on an entirely different channel.
Overall, I’m going to give that debate a vigorous No. None of the Above, please. We saw that Biden is too old and depleted to make up for his shitty moderate stances, and we already knew, and had confirmed for us, that Trump is a lying sack of crap who uses rage and cynicism to make up for his catastrophic reactionary stances. The whole thing just made me feel desperate and hopeless.
And that’s exactly the way it is supposed to be. At least according to the preferences of the people and forces which shape the politics of this country. Which, in our current state of affairs, is not the will of the people nor the votes of the majority: because this country is, practically speaking, not a democracy. The simplest understanding of a democracy is that the majority will of the people rules, and no president has ever been elected by a majority of the citizens of this country, let alone the residents. Certainly not these two specimens.
But that’s fine because this is actually a constitutionally limited republic, not a democracy. So there.
ACtually…
No, I’m fucking around, because there are internet bros who always get snotty when people in political arguments say this country is a democracy. It’s not. By the strictest definition, at least — and it’s a distinction that doesn’t even matter at all, and the fact that shitty people use their nitpickery about it to shame and silence people pisses me off: so I’m mocking those people. Sorry if it is confusing. At least the dog in that Actually meme is cute.
But here’s the real actually: whatever the intended shape of the government for this country, we are in truth currently controlled by an oligarchy: a plutocracy (or maybe a kakistocracy and certainly a kleptocracy) made up of people with too much money, who are willing (unsurprising, but still disgusting) and able (appalling and even more disgusting) to influence the political machinery of the country in order to benefit themselves, at the expense of all the rest of us. They have captured both major parties, thanks in large part to the influential power of money in our elections, particularly as unleashed by the Citizens United decision, and sanctioned de facto by politicians’ continued inability to pass election financing reform, solely because they put their own interests before those of the nation or their constituents.
Unsurprising. But still disgusting.
Because the people who run the politicians who run the country are in the business of doing business — namely using their money to make even more money, which is their sole purpose and motivation, their raison d’etre — the corruptions they create in our politics are mostly those which benefit business. They just got their personal Supreme Court to knock down Chevron deference, for instance, which will make it much easier for them — rich people who can afford the attorneys and legal costs, that is — to challenge government regulations in court, because now judges, who are definitely not experts in such matters as workplace safety or environmental impact, but who, like most people — especially these fucking people
Or at least six of them
— like to think they are experts in every way that actually matters, can knock down regulations that they personally don’t think are valid or necessary. Even if the actual experts disagree with them. And do we think that our One-Percenter overlords will be taking advantage of this process?
You bet your sweet bippy we do.
But the point is, the people in charge are best served by the continued dominance of the two major parties. Because both parties rely on enormous infusions of cash in order to defeat — each other. Elections like this one, choices like this one — like the contest between these two terrible old men, the Mummy and the Blob — serve the preferences of the ruling class, because they make us desperate, not hopeful. If we had a good candidate, one who gave us hope — and the last one such was Barack Obama (who still was not a great president, because he, like Joe, was too moderate and didn’t do enough to change the life of the average citizen of this country; though in fairness to Obama, he was trying to make change pretty much on his own, and fighting against the entire political machine, and of course he lost. Donald Trump gave some segment of the populace hope, but he’s a lying sack of shit, so that hope doesn’t count, in my opinion.) — then it would inspire people to get involved, to take action; the rulers do better, have more control, when we despair, and give up, and lie down and take it. Take whatever they give us, and hate everything — and do nothing. Most of us don’t even vote. Which makes it that much easier for the plutocrats to control the votes of those who do turn out. And they like that it is only two parties, and in every specific electoral contest, for every seat and every office, it is winner take all — the person who gets one more vote beats the person who gets one fewer vote — because that also makes it easier to control the politicians. This system means the two opponents are best served by focusing only on each other, cooperatively blocking any third candidate (who already has a named role in most three-way races: “spoiler”) and fighting to the death against their one nemesis, fighting for every single vote: and that means the holders of the moneybags, the distributors of the thirty pieces of silver — the rich fuckers who try to control everything — have a death grip on the entire system, because they have a death grip on both of the two major parties: because they offer either party a way to destroy the other party if the other party dares to try to give up that sweet, sweet dark campaign money. Their money is the best way for both parties to get one more vote than the other party.
See? If the Democrats stop taking corporate One-Percenter cash, they will lose all elections to the Republicans, and vice versa. Shit, even members of the parties who don’t continue to meet with the approval of our corporate masters can’t win elections, because they can’t win primaries in the face of huge amounts of money. And third parties can’t possibly compete with the amount of money that continues to flow to the two major parties — and there’s no need for the One-Percenters to shift their money to the third parties, because the two major parties do everything their masters ask of them, whether it is Trump cutting taxes on corporations (with a bone thrown to the rest of us in the form of a middle class tax cut which had a sunset clause, the tax cuts ending in 2025 [After the end of a hypothetical second Trump term, and no it’s not a coincidence: there ain’t no cynic like a government cynic], while the corporate tax cut did not.) or Biden failing to rein in the corporate profiteering which helped drive the inflation that may cost him re-election.
But if Biden, like Trump, fails to win re-election, that doesn’t matter, of course, at least not to the people who matter; because if Biden loses, our corporate hegemony will be perfectly satisfied with Trump in the White House. The one they couldn’t abide would be Bernie: and that’s why Bernie lost two primaries to deeply unpopular candidates. Because money. And political machinery controlled by money.
Wow. I’m sorry: I didn’t even mean to go that far down this road. Now I’m wrecked in the eternal darkness of the abyss at the end, mired in hopelessness.
No. Fuck that. You know why? Because there is hope. Really. There is hope because, whatever those racist elitist pricks who founded this country meant to do, what they actually did was create a lasting democracy. A democracy — shut the FUCK up about a constitutionally limited republic, please, Internet Bros — because the power to change the entire government rests, in the end, in the hands of the people. No matter how cynical we are, I am, about who is in charge, and no matter how we keep feeling like there’s no way anything can change: there IS a way for things to change, and it is through Americans casting votes for their choice of candidate (and in some cases for their choice of laws). Because we can choose to remove and replace our elected officials, who — money or not — are chosen ONLY by votes, according to our laws, according to our system of government. There is no tiebreaker that counts how much money the candidate has. All that matters, for determining who runs this country, is the votes.
Yes: of course those votes are generally easy to influence through money; that’s how we got to where we are. But influence is not control. No matter how many times I call them overlords and masters and rulers, they are not: the rich influence everything, and so end up getting what they want most of the time. But not all the time. Because it is still votes that change the government. All of it: obviously we could vote in a new President, and new Senators and Representatives; but also, if we stack up enough votes for congresspeople who will actually do what we want them to do, then even the Supreme Court, the one unelected branch, can be controlled: they can be impeached and removed from office, they can be outnumbered by an expansion of the Court, their decisions can be overridden by laws passed by Congress, and even, if necessary, by Constitutional amendments: which are passed by popular vote.
Make no mistake: getting people to vote for anything is nearly impossible, unless you have, at this point, billions of dollars to pour into the campaign. But if something is nearly impossible, it is still possible.
Just like my hopes. Not all dead. Not yet.
(And also, let me note in passing that we have as much money as the One-Percenters: we just spend it on food and stuff. But we could buy ourselves an election, even in the face of all the dark money in the world, if we really needed to. Just think about that.)
It’s possible for us to throw off the yoke and chains of our oppressors. It is. We’ve done it before, in opposition to slavery and the secession of the Confederacy; after the Great Depression; during the fight for civil rights. We can do it again. The way to compensate for a lack of ready money to throw around is: organization. And patience. If I may paraphrase the Doors: they got the bucks, but — we got the numbers.
But that is the long term goal. So. What do we do about this current debacle?
Clearly we don’t want either of these fucking guys — sorry, I’ve gone far afield, let me bring it back:
We don’t want either of these fucking guys to be in control of our lives. Not even a little bit. I’ve been arguing for a while now, going back to 2020, that Biden is the better choice; but I still don’t want him to be President, and I never have. He was my third-to-last choice in the crowded Democratic field in 2020 (The two below him on my list were Marianne Williamson, because combining lunacy with complete inexperience is just about the worst thing you can do, and Michael Bloomberg, because actually putting one of the One-Percenters in charge is the worst thing you can do. [Note that, Trumpers. I don’t know how you got tricked into forgetting that, but that’s who Trump really is. Actually.]), and he was my second choice even in this election where my first choices (Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — and Andrew Yang, and Jay Inslee, and Cory Booker and Julian Castro and John Hickenlooper and Tim Ryan and JESUS CHRIST FUCKING ANYBODY ELSE) didn’t run, because Dr. Cornel West would be a far better President than either the Geezer or the Groper. The Sleeper or the Shitbag. The Fumbler or the Fascist.
So do we vote for the third party candidates?
Do we boycott and refuse to vote?
We do not: because this election will put one of these two into the White House. The system cannot change between now and November; not unless we actually rise up and revolt. I don’t plan to grab a pitchfork and light a torch; if you do, we’re going to have to have some serious talks about what you plan to do and why, because violent revolution is something I can’t support as a pacifist; and as someone who both read AND understood George Orwell’s 1984 (That’s not a dig against you: that’s another one for the internet bros who say things like, “Facebook took down my anti-trans meme! It’s LITERALLY 1984!”), I recognize that revolutions generally don’t change the system, they only change the people who hold the whip: they don’t change who the whip falls on, nor remove the whip entirely. So we can discuss it, but I don’t think violent revolution is the right thing to do.
I think the right thing to do is to work on improving the system. We don’t even need to change it, to tear it down and build a new one, because as I said, this actually is a democracy in the most important sense: no, we do not vote directly on all political matters (which is actually what a “democracy” means, control by the people without representatives), but our votes have the greatest authority. We can vote to change literally anything in our system, even the system itself through Constitutional amendment.
I do think we’ll need to change a whole lot of things to make the system functional in the long term. But there are a couple of specific things that we can work to change in the fairly short term — meaning in the next, say, five to twenty years, but not before November — that will make an enormous difference, and make it much easier — even simply possible — to change everything else we need to change. Those things are the factors which give the plutocrats their ability to influence politics so powerfully: unlimited money in campaigns, unlimited advertising in campaigns, monied lobbying and the revolving-door interactions between the government and industry, the winner-take-all two-party system (and other minority-rule structures like the electoral college). I think there are politicians who would be willing to change those things for the better. Or maybe there are people who would be willing to become politicians in order to change those things for the better. Starting with money in politics: that is the simplest and most direct way we have to challenge the plutocrats, the One-Percenters. And people like John McCain existed. People like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who unseated a corporate Democrat using only small-dollar donations, exist and are currently in Washington. It is possible. It can be done. It may take years or even decades to get a majority of such people in Congress: but we can do it. And that’s what we need to do.
I know some of you aren’t going to like hearing this, and I don’t like saying it: but the answer is, we have to vote for Joe Biden. The arguments haven’t changed, not even with that incredible faceplant of a debate performance. Trump is still a wannabe fascist, who will do untold damage to the actual lives of real people during the four years he would be in office; not to mention the damage he would do to our democracy. Biden is a failure as a leader of our nation: both because he hasn’t done nearly as much as he should have done, and because he is a miserable excuse for a figurehead — not the most important role of a president, but not a negligible one. But he is not a threat to our nation’s continued existence. Trump really is.
Don’t stay home: the MAGAts won’t. Don’t vote for RFK Jr. (If you would otherwise vote for a Democrat, that is: if you’re a Trump voter, go right ahead and vote for ol’ Brain Worms): he’s a seriously terrible candidate in his own right (and currently only on the ballot in eight states, so literally cannot win 270 electoral votes and take the presidency) and votes cast for him would only result in the victory of Trump or Biden, with no positive effect at all; because he’s not running as representative of a legitimate third party. If you want to vote Green Party or Libertarian Party or another established third party, that has more merit, because a larger number of votes cast for a third party makes it easier for the third party to gain entry into future races, which is part of the way we break the duopoly of Democrats and Republicans; but be aware that, in this election, taking a vote away from a Democrat, even a shambling mound like Joe Biden, makes it more likely that Trump will take over, and that will be very bad for us all. Including Republicans, whatever they think about how much they’ll laugh in all those stupid lib faces once Trump is in charge. The truth is that Donald Trump is not our friend, and will not do anything to help anyone but himself, if he is returned to the White House. I promise you. For the same reason, I will not be voting for Cornel West, even though I like and admire him and would choose him over every other candidate. My vote for Dr. West will not make him win: and I cannot abide the thought of a second Trump term.
So I will do the right thing to protect and serve my country and my fellow Americans: I will not choose None of the Above, and I will not cast a protest vote. I will vote for Joe Biden.
This fucking guy.
And then I will work to make sure this kind of bullshit stops. Once and for all.
My favorite bit is that “Trump appeared to look blankly forward as jurors exited.”
Donald Trump was found guilty on 34 felony counts. Class E felonies, sure — but that’s still 34 more felonies than I’ve ever been convicted of, 34 more than anyone in my family has been convicted of, 34 more than Joe Biden has been convicted of.
So that’s that, right? Surely no one would want to vote for a convicted felon.
Except of course they will.
Notice how it isn’t “100% Trump should end campaign.” Which 50% of the population do you think said that he should end it?
Notice this number is higher than 50%: which means a good number of people who would vote for him still will even though he has been found guilty.
I really wish this said “Rootin Tootin” somewhere
This one is amazing. Though I wish I could make out those tattoos. Think there’s a swastika in there somewhere?
They’ve made him an Outlaw. Here is my statement on the tyrannical overreach targeting former President Donald Trump pic.twitter.com/adJM1lKfsy
I just think he should have gone a little lighter on those eye-bags.
And speaking of going a little lighter… ain’t nobody got hair that yellow.
I just want to know: who looks at these images and thinks, “Yes. That is a perfect depiction of how I see this man. This captures my feelings exactly.” I don’t doubt a lot of the images are intended mainly to troll the left, but also, there is literally no sense of irony in MAGA world, and since many of these kinds of images get shared mainly or exclusively in MAGA world, there are actually people there who are encouraged by them. Who nod and think, “Hell yeah!” Seriously.
I can’t imagine feeling that on the other side, not really. I mean, this stuff is insane:
(I do appreciate the strong Dr. Manhattan vibes in that image. Even more than the AR-15 Iron Throne.)
How does that even look like Biden??
I actually like this one, though.
Because they didn’t try to change his appearance. At all. It’s like an old man spontaneously combusting and really confused about it. Hilarious.
But it’s still not going to make me vote for Biden.
No, I’m voting for Joe Biden because I think he’s a decent man who’s done a decent job as president. I’ve talked about it in other posts, I will talk about it more (Now that school is out and my brain has had a chance to recover — this was a really bad year, y’all.), but that’s the reason. Full stop. Not because he’s a Socialist — he’s not, though I wish he were — and not because I fucking hate Trump that much — I do, but that’s not a good enough reason to vote for Biden — but because he’s a decent man who’s done a decent job. Do I wish Biden would step aside with dignity and let somebody else be the Democratic nominee? I do. Do I think that any decent Democratic candidate — who had reasonable credentials on reproductive rights — would kick Trump’s ass in the election? I do, especially now that Trump’s a convicted felon whom most independents already didn’t like. But Biden is worth voting for. That’s my position.
On the other hand, we have this position:
A friend of mine on Facebook shared this meme. (Actually several did; this one was popular.)
And a mutual acquaintance of ours commented thusly:
As much as I dislike both of them I think that whole court case was a crock of shit and shows how people with political power can weaponize the judicial system. That judge on this case was about as corrupt as they get smfh.
So notice how this comment starts by bringing in Joe Biden (Am I presuming too much in saying Joe Biden is the other in “both of them?” I am not. I knew his position, and he confirms it in later comments.), even though the meme had nothing to do with Biden, as the trial had nothing to do with Biden: this was a New York case, brought by the Manhattan DA, about events that happened in 2006 and 2015-2016, and were revealed to the public in 2018. Nothing here to do with Biden’s campaign against Trump. Notice how this makes some pretty extreme accusations — the whole case was a “crock of shit,” people with political power can weaponize the judicial system, the judge was “about as corrupt as they get” — but provides no evidence at all.
This is not unique, of course. This is how American political discourse usually goes. We are all inside our little tents, holding up the collapsing tent poles, ignoring the canvas (or nylon? I honestly don’t know anything about tents, I haven’t been camping since I was 14. Imma go with canvas because I think the metaphor should be circus tents. Don’t you? Uh… circus tents are canvas, right?) falling all around us, completely cutting us off from the outside world, while we yell at people in the other tents that their tent is bad and stupid and they should really be in OUR tent.
To be clear: the Democratic tent is bad, but the Republican party tent has currently been taken over by a proto-fascist cult of personality worshipping a convicted felon. (Love how that last part rolls off the tongue. No, I’m not fucking objective. There are not fine people on both sides. There are formerly fine people in the Republican party who decided to give up on being fine people in order to support the proto-fascist cult of personality worshipping a convicted felon. They don’t get to be fine so long as they are in that tent. If they come out they can be fine people again — even very fine people. There are fine people in the other tents — though not the Libertarians. Libertarians are assholes. But that’s just a joke. The Trump tent comment is not.) They are not the same party, they are not in the same situation. They are not equal, not in any way. I’m just recognizing that a lot of Democrats are blind to reality, too. Including Joe Biden, in some ways. He really should step aside. It would be better for the country.
My first response was fully inside my tent. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote, but it was irate. (I will also say I have a history with this fellow; while he is in some ways reasonable and open-minded, in other ways he is a lot of things I dislike. Even hate. Hence my knee-jerk reaction was not the right one.) It started with “What in the Fox News are you talking about?” (Okay, I admit I’m including that mostly because I’m proud of the phrase, and I want to remember it to use it some other time for real.) I said that there was no political weaponization of the judicial system, the judge was not corrupt, the case was not a crock of shit. I used more words, but that was all I said. And then I hit Post.
I did not provide evidence. I did not explain my arguments. I did not provide context. I just said “NO!” a lot.
It was not a useful contribution to an argument.
So I thought about it. Part of me did not really want to engage in this debate: because I know that there are people who are not worth engaging with because they will not listen and they will not take conversation seriously, they will only take the opportunity provided by disagreement to mock and yell and crow and scoff, which just makes me mad and spreads more distrust and disinformation. That’s what happened the last time I got into an argument with a Trumper (Note: this fellow is not a Trumper, as he hinted and as he said in more detail later), and I specifically didn’t engage with said Trumper because I knew he wouldn’t be an honest participant in a discussion. I said so. He got quite exercised in insulting me and lying about the state of this country — in that case, it was about immigration, because he was also a racist. Shocking, I know.
But part of me knows that this fellow, while he has said things and done things which I dislike and even hate, is also sometimes open-minded, and also sometimes rational, and also sometimes kind.
And more importantly, there is the person I am when I am irritated or angry, and there is the person I think I need to be in order to do what I can to help our society to heal.
So I deleted that comment (Not fast enough, because he was already replying to it, and noted that I had changed my comment; I apologized and invited him to bring up anything from my comment which he wanted to challenge me on. Because I want to be the person I think I need to be.) and replaced it with two questions:
What makes you say the judge was corrupt? And which people with political power weaponized the justice system?
Because I realized something in the last year or two. When I am teaching, I ask questions. All the time. It’s pretty much all I do when my students make comments or observations in discussion. Either I recognize them for their point, and thank them/compliment them/build off of what they said to continue the discussion — or I ask a question. “Why?” is my favorite, of course, though I mostly have to add more words to that — “Why do you think that?” or “Why do you think that character acts that way,” etc. — but I ask other questions, too, all kinds of them, one after another. I rarely make statements, I rarely agree or disagree with them: that isn’t my job. My job is to make them think. And the questions do that quite well. So I realized that I should ask more questions in my political discussions, rather than simply making statements or trying to disprove or deconstruct my opponents’ opinions or ideas. Usually because the positions I oppose do not have internal logic or consistency, and simply asking someone questions about their positions will frequently show the flaws in those positions, without me ever having to get into a fight about what is true and what is not.
And here’s the response I got in this instance, from this fellow. (Partly this was in response to my original combative tone, because he was replying to my first comment, not my questions; I’m not trying to cover up that I reacted badly, just trying to show that I know I did it the wrong way, and my two questions were what I think was the right way. [I will also note that while I am writing this, I am also arguing with a dude who thinks there should be a Heterosexual Pride Day because discrimination against LGBTQIA+ people is mostly gone, and in fact LGBTQIA+ people are now the real bullies, and they are picking on heterosexuals. And I am not simply asking him questions. I am being as polite as I can be, but I am also making declarative statements that he is simply wrong. So I guess I’m not perfect yet. But also — FUCKIN REALLY?!?!?!?!?!])
Theoden Humphrey a NYC DA who campaigned on the sole fact he was gonna find and convict Donald Trump of a crime. Whose campaign was also funded by none other than now ex-WEF leader George Soros.
The trial took place in an 87% Democrat county.
The judge who is a major Biden campaign donor. Also the judge’s daughter works with Leticia James who also has a hard on for convicting Trump.
Evidence of a crime that exceeds the statute of limitation since 2019 but upgraded what is normally a misdemeanor to a class E felony due to other crimes not mentioned being committed.
Corrupt judge tells jury that they do not need to agree on verdict unanimously they just have to agree that Trump committed some kind of crime. Which is a first.
And 34 counts yes. However, they will only sentence him on 1 because all 34 are considered the same 1 “crime”
I just think that this is political persecution to suppress a political opponent. And I’m not really on the Trump train any more. I really enjoy what robert f Kennedy has to offer and think that he better represents the middle isle American who supports the constitution and has left and right leaning views. He’s pro choice and pro 2A I like both those things.
Let’s be real. Biden and Trump are both equally pieces of wealthy filth and we need a big change from what we are being spoon fed. We are stuck with two dog shit choices. Either far left or far fuckin right. All the two parties we have to chose from are doing is further driving a wedge of division in this country.
If Trump is truly guilty throw his ass in prison for 4 years for committing a class E felony. But they should also go after every single politician left and right wing who’s paid out hush money and done exactly what the pos orange man did. I’m just as sick of hearing trumps bullshit as you are too. I’m also sick of genocide joe not giving a single shit about you and I. Neither of them represent us fairly.
I just think that this whole court case crap is only going to fuel the fire of his supporters. Also think it’s coincidental that the sentencing hearing is 4 days before the RNC. Honestly they should have done this 4 years ago when he left office instead of confidently waiting until 6 months before the election. And again I’m not stroking trumps ego on this but I think it’s just in time that now the biden campaign can put ads out talking about how Trump is a convicted felon etc etc.
We are all tired of both biden and trumps shit. And we the people have absolutely no say in a third party member being elected. Here in November 2024 we get two shit ass choice like we have for the last 2 decades. You get to pick corrupt left wing or corrupt right wing. And really your vote don’t mean shit anyways. If you’re a Democrat living in a red state your state is not representing your beliefs same with if your republican living in a blue state.
It’s all a crock of shit Humphrey. Can we atleast agree on that ?
My response to this comment was this:
No, we can’t agree that it’s all a crock of shit. There’s a lot of shit in the mix, absolutely: but there are things here that matter. Things like democracy and the rule of law. Truth. Simple human decency. They matter so much that I believe it’s worth digging through all that shit and wiping it away.
You’ve done something here that we shouldn’t do. That’s not an accusation; I did it too — this was my second reply on your comment, I deleted the first one, because sure I did what you’ve done here: I made statements without evidence, without even fully explaining my point; arguing only by innuendo and implication. I deleted that bad argument, and now I’m going to challenge you on yours. I hope you’ll reach across and work with me on this: because this, too, is important: communication and understanding.
Start with your first point: Alvin Bragg. How do you know he campaigned on going after Trump? And if he did, what would that show about him or what happened in this case? Did he lie? Fake evidence? Bribe the judge? Suborn the jury? Intimidate the witnesses? Same questions about Soros: how do you know he funded Bragg’s campaign? What would it mean if he did? Does that mean Bragg obeys his commands? What is Soros’s goal?
Okay: and here, though it has taken me my customary WAY TOO LONG to get to the point of this, is why I wanted to write about this. I’m not trying to embarrass or criticize my — let’s call him my interlocutor, the fellow I was having the discussion with — and I’m not really trying to argue with him; if I were, I would have continued on Facebook with him. He did post another comment (which I may turn into another post) and when I challenged him on that one, he replied to that challenge and said that he had been writing a long response with the evidence I was asking for, but it had gotten deleted; he then, quite rationally, moved on with his damn life, and the FB debate ended there.
And now here I am, continuing it.
Here’s why. I think there is a ton of misinformation out there in our world. I think a lot of it is spread in exactly this way, in comments on social media posts, which are presented as fact without any support or explanation, as both I and my interlocutor did. I think most of us do not have reliable news sources which we consult regularly, or sources of real information that explain what’s actually going on in our political world. That, I think, is why most of us have opinions that do not change according to new facts or new events: first because, frequently, we are unaware of new facts and new events; and second, because our opinions never were based on facts. I’m not really sure that mine are, either, and so I struggle, every time I write about politics, with the position I should take: should I be neutral and objective? Should I only talk about things I have researched extensively, things I can be considered an authority on? If I just share my opinions, which are not based on facts, how am I different from everyone else?
When I call Trump a fascist, for instance: what is the basis for that statement? Have I studied the history of fascism? Do I know specific instances of actions and positions taken by Trump that align with historical fascism? I have certainly read some history of fascism, and some political analysis of Trump and his GOP supporters that shows him to be aligned with fascism, so I feel fairly comfortable making the accusation: but I surely know that there is room for me to be wrong there, and I surely recognize that I could do more research and more fact-finding to support the opinion.
But the real question is: should I present the opinion? Or should I only present information that is proven to be true, that is purely factual and objective?
Okay, let’s be real. I’m a damn English teacher. And a fantasy/horror writer who likes pirates a lot. My opinions are not the ones that should be taken as proven objective facts.
But what I can offer, what I hope to offer, is what I asked my interlocutor for on Facebook, which he started to provide but then didn’t have time for — and which I now have time for — evidence. Explanation. Enough to show what we are actually talking about, and why we should or should not take it seriously.
So that’s what I want to do here. I want to engage with these talking points, and try to figure out if there is anything behind them. Not disprove them, not show that the fellow who posted this was wrong or bad in any way; but I want to explore these statements a little, and try to see if they are worth considering. If this seems valuable, then I will probably do it again with his second long comment, which I am not including here because this post is already too wordy. But, that’s how we roll here on Just Dusty, so I’m not going to apologize for my verbosity. Just gonna do my thingy.
Here we go.
First: Alvin Bragg. Manhattan District Attorney, who, allegedly, “campaigned on the sole fact he was gonna find and convict Donald Trump of a crime. Whose campaign was also funded by none other than now ex-WEF leader George Soros.”
But here’s the thing: does this matter? Is it wrong if a man running for DA, in a district that is, as was pointed out in the next statement, 87% Democratic, says he will go after the (at the time) current Republican president, who is one of the most hated politicians, especially in Democratic circles, of the past, say, twenty years? Does that show prejudice? We can certainly argue that maybe district attorneys shouldn’t campaign on going after political figures, but the question that has to be addressed is: is that respect for the separation of politics and justice, or is it suppression of justice for the sake of the appearance of respect for the separation of politics and justice? That is: if Trump was actually guilty (or could reasonably be accused, since we’re talking about decisions regarding bringing a case, not the verdict) of crimes, should the man running for DA say that he will prosecute Trump? Or should he back off because Trump is a politician?
Obviously we know what Trump would want in this case. But just as obviously, Trump’s position on this — and the same positions parroted by all of his supporters — are not about the respect for the separation of powers and the political process, because that same former President (now convicted felon) and his supporters said that Hillary Clinton should be locked up, and they’ve never stopped going after Joe and Hunter Biden with claims regarding criminality and the justice system.
Honestly, I can see the point in terms of, say, a judge, or a jury member. They need to have both the appearance of objectivity, as well as approaching as close to actual objectivity as they can. But the DA is not supposed to be unbiased. In fact, to do his or her job well, it seem reasonable that a DA should be as biased as possible: it would motivate them to work hard to find all of the evidence to prove their case in court, to prepare and formulate all the arguments and all the strategy needed to convict their target, to “Get their man.” So long as they can remain rational and uncorrupted in their prosecution, so long as they don’t intimidate witnesses, or bribe the judge, or falsify evidence, or try to suppress information or corrupt the jury, or any of the other ways that a DA could corrupt a criminal trial.
Does evidence of bias against Trump provide evidence of corruption or wrongdoing on the part of the DA?
It does not.
The same with Bragg receiving funding in his campaign from George Soros. My immediate question is: what is the impact of that funding? Did Soros call the man up and say “Here’s what I want in exchange for my money: someday — and that day may never come — I may ask you to do a service for me.” Or does his money buy access? Is there an assumption of what Bragg might have to do to maintain that level of funding in the future? Any or all of those would be a concern. (Though none of them would necessarily show that Bragg did anything corrupt in prosecuting Trump.)
But, actually, now that I think about it, my first question is, Is that even true? What evidence do we have that Soros funded Alvin Bragg’s campaign?
This is Mary Louise Kelly, from NPR, interviewing Emily Tamkin, a spokesperson from Soros’s organization.
KELLY: Let’s start with a basic fact check. What exactly is the connection between George Soros or his foundations and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg?
TAMKIN: So in this case, Soros gave money to a group called Color of Change, which is a social justice civil rights group that in turn gave some money to the campaign of District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
Right, okay. So in fact George Soros did not give money directly to Alvin Bragg, which pretty much shows that none of the immediate thoughts on possible corruption would be true. They might happen at one remove — Soros pressures Color of Change, and Color of Change pressures Bragg — but that disconnect makes it harder to believe that Soros had any real influence on Bragg. It does raise a question which Tamkin brought up in the NPR interview, while responding to the important question from Kelly:
KELLY: Yeah. I mean, is there any evidence that Soros got something for this money in the case of Alvin Bragg, that his money bought influence in some way?
TAMKIN: No, there’s no evidence of that. And just more broadly, there are critiques to be made – right? – about a billionaire philanthropist who gives money to prosecutors’ campaigns, right? We could have a conversation about money in politics, the power of billionaires in American society. All of that is fair game, right? But that’s not really what this is. This is over-assigning the influence of Soros over Bragg and also dramatically overstating the agency that Soros has over this case.
But how does the existence of George Soros giving money to a PAC which then gave money to Alvin Bragg show that Soros corrupted the case against Donald Trump as prosecuted by Alvin Bragg? And by the way, where is our understanding of what Soros wants which is corrupt in the first place?
It does not show that the case against Trump was corrupted. And the fact that no one that I have ever heard or seen bring up George Soros’s name can also offer a credible explanation of how he wants to corrupt American politics shows that this use of George Soros’s name to taint one’s political opponents by association is nothing but hot air. (I’m going to leave the description of how people usually go after Soros for another time, another place. Because it’s ugly. And completely off the point here.)
So what is the point here? The point is that the argument, the accusation, being made exists only because so much of it is left out, is unsaid. The argument leaves our imaginations to fill in the gaps. Alvin Bragg campaigned on getting Donald Trump: okay… and? This was why I asked for specific evidence of specific corrupt actions that my interlocutor was accusing Bragg of, and if he had made specific claims, I would have asked for evidence. As it stands, there’s not even really an accusation. He never said “George Soros commanded Bragg, in exchange for his political donation of X dollars, to frame Trump so that Biden could defeat Trump in the election because Biden is trying to create a Socialist state and that’s what Soros wants, so Bragg tampered with evidence and intimidated witnesses to get them to lie about Trump on the stand.” See how that specific kind of claim just screams for evidence? “How do you know all of that?” would be the only thought in my head if I were to read all of that. Which is why that claim wasn’t made: because of course there isn’t evidence for that claim, because it is not true. All this fellow said was “Bragg was funded by Soros.” Never even gave the specifics about how that funding was provided (I’m sure he didn’t know), and neither of us have provided how much funding there was; he didn’t say that only Soros funded Bragg’s campaign, which of course is also not true, but that’s implied in the wording.
This is what I’m talking about. This is argument by innuendo, by hints and implications, accusations left unsaid because we all know what’s really going on here. But what’s really going on here is bad argument, bad discussion: misinformation. We are all doing it, all the time.
We need to stop.
Okay. Moving on.
Next: the case took place in an 87% Democratic county. (Not even sure if that’s true: this website shows it, but — it’s BestPlaces, a real estate website, so not the most reliable source of political information; and the info on this page alone seems to contradict that 87% figure a couple of times, so — I dunno. I’ll stipulate it. [Which is what Trump should have done with his affair with Stephanie Clifford, who uses the stage name Stormy Daniels, who therefore wouldn’t have had to testify in open court about how she spanked his ass, how she rejected his pathetic attempt to Hugh Hefner her, how he didn’t use a condom — all the salacious details which embarrassed Trump, which his lawyers claimed prejudiced the jury and tainted the verdict, all could have been avoided if they had stipulated the affair had happened; but Trump wanted to pretend he never had sex with Ms. Clifford. So here we are, with Trump hoist on his own petard. But I digress.])
The main question is: does this fact, that 87% of Manhattan voted Democrat, show bias against Trump in the potential jury pool?
You bet your ass it does. Any poll — every poll — shows that Democrats pretty roundly and universally and virulently hate Donald Trump. I certainly do, for all kinds of rational and irrational reasons, which I would be happy to list except I already have so just read this if you want.
But.
Two questions: one cynical but important, and one much more to the point.
The cynical question is: yes, and? How is this jury pool different from any other? It’s Donald freaking Trump: what else would you expect? Of course Democrats hate this guy. Just as, of course, Republicans love him (and I’m going to resist the temptation here to point out that they SHOULD NOT, and just accept that they do); it seems clear that any Republican district would have just as much potential bias in the jury pool, it would just have the opposite polarity, so to speak. Of course Trump would like to move the trial to a Republican district; he likes that bias better. But is there anywhere the trial could be moved that would lead to an unbiased jury pool? Everyone is biased when it comes to the 45th President of the U.S. of A. Do we really think there are a dozen people in any locale in these United States who don’t already have a strong opinion of Donald Trump? And here’s the cynical part: there is, therefore, no possible way to find an unbiased jury, if — if — we think that political affiliation and voting record are prejudicial in terms of a juror’s ability to come to a fair verdict beyond a reasonable doubt. Which is where Trump wants to take this argument: to the conclusion that, if there is no way to find an unbiased jury — he should simply never be tried for his crimes. He should be allowed to act with impunity, because any jury would be biased, and therefore incapable of rendering a fair verdict.
I don’t think I need to say that I would not want that situation to happen. I do not want anyone to be above the law. Especially not Donald Trump.
And now we get to the question that really comes to the point. Do we believe that people who voted Democratic in 2016 or 2020, or at any time in the last fifty years, are incapable of setting aside those political views in order to serve as a juror in a criminal case regarding the President as a private citizen campaigning for political office?
Do we really believe that any opinion, one way or another, means that people cannot be fair? Really? Because then we’re going to have to set aside all judgment in all cases, forever and ever. I mean all cases: which parent could fairly judge their child? Don’t parents have opinions about their children? What teacher could grade an assignment? We all have opinions about our students.
Shall I point out here that my interlocutor is a former student?
Look: this is important, but we all know it’s important, so it is already a carefully considered factor. People knowing about something does not mean they are necessarily incapable of fairly judging an event or person associated with that thing. People having connections to a person, or a party, or an experience of any kind, does not necessarily mean that person is incapable of being objective and judging fairly. But because we recognize that it could, that a previous opinion could create an unfair bias, the entire justice system is designed to get around that fact.
I mean: ALL of it. Twelve jurors, selected randomly, then vetted by the judge and by both sides’ attorneys. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Unanimous verdict. The right to appeal. Every bit of it, and a hundred other things I didn’t mention — rules of evidence, and admissibility in court, and having statements removed from the record, and jury instructions, and alternative jurors, and jury sequestration, and on and on — is intended to address the problem of jurors’ possible prejudice.
To dismiss that simply because someone voted a particular party at some point in the past — no, not even that; because the people who lived in an area voted for a particular party in the past, which does not include all the people in the area because in addition to the 14% or so who didn’t vote Democrat, there are the 50% or so who didn’t vote, and the people who moved into the area since then — and every single person who voted for Democrats and also voted for one Donald J. Trump.
Like this fucking guy.
Donald Trump registered as a Republican in Manhattan in 1987; since that time, he has changed his party affiliation five times. In 1999, Trump changed his party affiliation to the Independence Party of New York. In August 2001, Trump changed his party affiliation to Democratic. In September 2009, Trump changed his party affiliation back to the Republican Party. In December 2011, Trump changed to “no party affiliation” (independent). In April 2012, Trump again returned to the Republican Party. (From Wikipedia, emphasis added)
To dismiss every precaution built into the system, every application of judgment about someone’s potential bias, every possibility that someone could look beyond their bias and be a fair juror — that’s not cynical. It’s downright absurd. It’s bullshit.
I have thought to myself, since the trial started, that I could be a juror. I would never pass the voir dire, because they looked at past social media posts, and I’ve been pretty clear that I have strong opinions about Trump; his lawyers would strike me in a hot minute. And they’d be right to do so, because no matter how much I flatter myself that I could be impartial, I would not have the appearance of impartiality (and, honestly, probably not the fact of it either), and my presence on the jury would undermine confidence in the verdict. So even though I think I could be impartial, I wouldn’t be on the jury. Not because I have voted for Democrats, but because I have railed against Trump more times than I could count. I said in this very post that I hate the fucking guy, and I do. So, biased.
(I still kinda think I could be impartial because I do not like all of my students, but I treat them all fairly and grade them all as impartially as I can. But also, a grade on an essay is not a criminal verdict, and none of my students are as hateable as the Nazi Cheeto.)
There’s a process, a system, for finding the most impartial jury possible, and getting those twelve people to overcome any biases they come in with. It’s an imperfect system. But it’s a good system. It deserves our trust. A whole lot more than Donald Trump does.
I’m going to put the next claim, that Judge Merchan was a “major Biden donor” into the same category here; either we trust that someone can put aside their political affiliations in order to serve as a judge in a criminal case — or else we should TAKE THE GODDAMN MAR-A-LAGO DOCUMENTS CASE AWAY FROM EILEEN CANNON.
But I digress.
(Oh also — the claim that Judge Merchan’s daughter worked for Letitia James, who also “has a hard on for convicting Trump” is not true. My interlocutor is mixing up his false claims here. Laura Loomer, an idiot who pushes pro-Trump messaging on the internet, claimed that Merchan’s wife worked for Letitia James, and since it was Loomer who said it, it’s probably not true at all, and if it is it doesn’t show that Mrs. Merchan is biased in favor of AG James; I have worked for a lot of people, and most of them, I DID NOT LIKE, not even if they were as badass as Letitia James — who, if I may say, is the Attorney General of the state of New York, and the first woman and the first African-American elected to hold that post, which means she is amazing on a scale well beyond what this discussion can capture — while Merchan’s daughter is the president and partner of a consulting firm that works for all kinds of big name political clients, including Vice President Kamala Harris. So I’m not sure that any of this claim holds water at all. But if it does? Absolutely none of this shows any particular unfair corrupting bias on the part of Judge Merchan, so we’re just going to leave this one alone. Now, if the judge’s wife had raised a “FUCK TRUMP” flag over the judge’s house during the trial…)
Okay. Phew. I can see why people prefer to argue without explanations and evidence: this is hard. And time-consuming.
But this is how it needs to be: we need to actually show what the hell we are talking about, using resources from other than our own memory or imagination, and we need to actually explain the claims we make. It’s not enough to just be like “THE JUDGE GAVE MONEY TO BIDEN!” You have to go the next step: tell me how this fact (which you also would need to provide evidence for) shows unfair bias on the judge’s part, which was shown in this specific statement or action.
And if that means we might talk less and raise fewer, better points in our arguments? Well, all I can say is I know how long this post is.
But long or not, let me provide some evidence, in the shape of one quick example: Judge Webster Thayer presided over the trial of Niccolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the two Italian immigrants and anarchists who were convicted and executed for the murder of two guards during the robbery of a payroll in 1920. Here’s Thayer’s bias, which did indeed have an impact on the conviction and execution of these two (probably innocent) men:
Thayer’s behavior both on and off the bench during the trial drew criticism. A Boston Globe reporter, Frank Sibley, who had covered the trial, wrote a letter of protest to the Massachusetts attorney general condemning Thayer’s bias. Others noted the frequency with which Thayer denied defense motions and the way he addressed defense attorney Fred H. Moore. Thayer defended his rulings to reporters saying, “No long-haired anarchist from California can run this court!” According to onlookers who later swore affidavits, in private discussion Thayer called Sacco and Vanzetti “Bolsheviki!” and said he would “get them good and proper”. In 1924, referring to his denial of motions for a new trial, Thayer confronted a Massachusetts lawyer: “Did you see what I did with those anarchistic bastards the other day?” the judge said. “I guess that will hold them for a while! Let them go and see now what they can get out of the Supreme Court!” The outburst remained a secret until 1927 when its release fueled the arguments of Sacco and Vanzetti’s defenders. The New York World attacked Thayer as “an agitated little man looking for publicity and utterly impervious to the ethical standards one has the right to expect of a man presiding in a capital case.”[1] From Wikipedia
So. Get me audio of Judge Merchan saying, “Did you see what I did to that fascist orange motherfucker last month?” and I’ll say he was unfairly biased. Let him deny motions for an appeal or a new trial and then say “I guess that will hold those shitheads for a while! Let them see what they can get out of the Supreme Court!*” and then I’ll say Merchan’s actions were unfair based on his prejudices. Drop some innuendo based on the assumption that political affiliation is a universal source of unconquerable prejudice? I will simply point out that oftentimes an accusation is a confession.
*Also, what they could get from the Supreme Court is: probably any fucking thing they want, because the SCOTUS is, in my opinion, both corrupt and unethical, and also unfairly biased and prejudiced in their judgments connected to Donald Trump. But I digress.
Okay: now we get to the issues regarding the actual case, rather than the people involved. There are three presented.
Evidence of a crime that exceeds the statute of limitation since 2019 but upgraded what is normally a misdemeanor to a class E felony due to other crimes not mentioned being committed.
Corrupt judge tells jury that they do not need to agree on verdict unanimously they just have to agree that Trump committed some kind of crime. Which is a first.
And 34 counts yes. However, they will only sentence him on 1 because all 34 are considered the same 1 “crime”
CLAIM: “They missed the statute of limitations by a lot because this was very old. They could have brought this seven years ago instead of bringing it right in the middle of the election.”
THE FACTS: Judge Merchan in February denied a request from Trump’s legal team to dismiss the indictment on the grounds that the statute of limitations had passed, according to court documents.
In his decision, Merchan cited pandemic-era executive orders issued in March 2020 and April 2021 by former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo that extended the limit on filing criminal charges.
New York’s statute of limitations for most felonies is five years. The earliest charge in Trump’s felony indictment was described as occurring on Feb. 14, 2017, while the indictment was filed on March 30, 2023.
(And just in case someone disagrees with this: okay, show me the evidence that this statute of limitations claim is valid.)
The misdemeanor being raised to a felony is something that should be considered; but there is a reasonable argument for the felony: the crime was committed in pursuance of committing another crime, which makes the offense more serious. Reasonably: because someone who will commit one crime in order to commit a second crime is more likely to commit a third crime. Right? So that increases the severity of the initial crime being tried here, the falsification of business records. Alone, it’s a misdemeanor; in conjunction with another crime, it’s a class E felony — which is not far away from a misdemeanor, honestly. We can and should question the step the DA took to try this as an felony, but we can see that choice as reflecting the facts of the case, and thereby necessitating a trial — because if this was only a misdemeanor there’s no way we have this trial — or we can see it as a biased DA corrupting the law in order to go after Trump.
If you think it’s the second one? Prove it.
I think it’s the first one. Not least because the jury, whom I will trust because I trust the system, in the absence of specific evidence to the contrary, convicted Trump of the felonies, which at least implies, post facto, that there was validity in the argument. But let’s get into the details a little more.
Let me include the next claim, that Judge Merchan (who is, in the absence of any specific evidence, definitely not corrupt) instructed the jury that they did not need to be unanimous on the verdict, they just needed to agree that Trump committed some kind of crime.
False. Or at least unclearly stated to such an extent that it becomes false.
Under New York law, falsification of business records is a crime when the records are altered with an intent to defraud. To be charged as a felony, prosecutors must also show that the offender intended to “commit another crime” or “aid or conceal” another crime when falsifying records.
In Trump’s case, prosecutors said that other crime was a violation of a New York election law that makes it illegal for “any two or more persons” to “conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means,” as Justice Juan Merchan explained in his instructions to the jury.
What exactly those “unlawful means” were in this case was up to the jury to decide. Prosecutors put forth three areas that they could consider: a violation of federal campaign finance laws, falsification of other business records or a violation of tax laws.
Jurors did not need to agree on what the underlying “unlawful means” were. But they did have to unanimously conclude that Trump caused the business records to be falsified, and that he “did so with intent to defraud that included an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.”
So the crime, the falsification of business records, was well and fully proven by the prosecution; it was what they found him guilty of. 34 times. They also proved guilt in the secondary crime which the falsification was in pursuance of, conspiracy to promote the election of one Donald J. Trump ; that was why they used David Pecker of the National Enquirer as their first star witness.
What they did not need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt was which specific law was violated in the “unlawful means” used to promote the election of Trump. It could have been any of three crimes, all of which had evidence in support provided during the trial; they did not need to prove, and the jury did not need to agree, on which unlawful means were used — or rather, on why specifically those means were unlawful — because that was not the matter being tried here; the jury’s opinion of it was enough for the sake of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump committed the crime of falsification in pursuance of another crime, fraud to promote the election of a specific person. So that’s the answer to the objection: this is part of how the system works. And I should point out that, contrary to the claim that this was unprecedented, this happens all the time: every plea deal involves changing charges up or down the scale of severity, even if the charge that results is not entirely apropos. And every case involving a difficult-to-try person involves crimes that can be proven, which stand in for crimes that can’t be proven but definitely happened; just ask Al Capone. So really, if we don’t like this, we don’t like the thousands of other times it happens in our justice system daily.
I will also say that, honestly, I don’t like that they did this. I have heard legal commentators on NPR saying they think this specific element may lead to a successful appeal of the verdict, and I don’t like that.
But the point here is that I don’t really understand the legal maneuver that the DA used in this case. Not that it was bad, or that it made the verdict bad; just that I don’t understand it, and therefore I don’t like it. Using the same gut-feeling level of decision making, I will say that I believe in my gut that Trump absolutely committed this crime; maybe he shouldn’t have been convicted of it, and maybe he shouldn’t have been convicted in this way — but if he got away with this, that would be a miscarriage of justice.
And we’ll leave this for the Court of Appeals to decide.
Also, not that I want to descend into whataboutism, but if we’re talking about miscarriages of justice? Trump should be on trial in three other court rooms, with stronger evidence of more serious crimes. The fact that he is not, and maybe never will be, shows a miscarriage of justice that FAR outweighs any issue about the misdemeanor felonies and the unlawful means.
Moving on again.
The last one, that Trump was convicted of 34 crimes that were all one crime and so will only be sentenced for one crime — I mean, sure, and that’s why Judge Merchan will probably not sentence him to 34 penalties. This is an area of the justice system that is quite rightly left up to judges to decide in sentencing: sometimes it matters that a crime was committed 34 times, even if it was the same crime. If someone murdered 34 people, that’s different than one murder. If someone raped the same victim 34 times, that is not one crime.
In this case, does the minor nature and the repetitiveness of all 34 counts mean we shouldn’t keep emphasizing that Trump was convicted of 34 felonies?
Sure, maybe. But also: it’s fun to say it. And I’m not going to apologize for, nor draw back, my shit-talking about Donald Trump. This is one case where I will gleefully say “Fuck your feelings.” Karma’s a bitch.
Okay: now we get to the general commentary at the end of the list of factual concerns regarding Trump’s trial and conviction.
First is this: “I just think that this is political persecution to suppress a political opponent.”
Not one thing in all of this so far connected Joe Biden to this trial. Not one thing. Okay: George Soros, and the fact that both Alvin Bragg and Joe Biden — and Judge Merchan, and most Manhattan voters — are Democrats. But man, if everything every Democrat does is in service of and part of a conspiracy involving Joe Biden, then I need to stop writing this blog: I am clearly committing political persecution of Donald J. Trump, at the behest of Joe Biden.
Now, is it convenient for Biden that Trump was tried and convicted? Sure — but let me grab another statement that was made a few sentences later.
I just think that this whole court case crap is only going to fuel the fire of his supporters.
And you’re right. I started out by saying that the verdict doesn’t change very many votes , either way. So why would Biden go after Trump in this way in hopes of changing the election? Doesn’t this show the opposite, that Biden probably didn’t try to do this in order to suppress a political opponent, because this clearly didn’t work, and polls have been showing for months that a conviction wouldn’t swing the election? And I think we all know that a felony conviction doesn’t disqualify anyone from running for president, or from serving if they win. Biden and his advisors knew that. So unless we assume that Biden and all of his political advisors are so completely out of touch or so thoroughly stupid that they didn’t know that Trump’s voters would not change their vote because of the verdict, it’s not reasonable to assume, in the absence of evidence, that Biden masterminded this whole thing. And that Biden and his team were too dumb to recognize the futility is a very poor assumption: after all, whatever else we may think of Joe Biden, the man won election to the highest office in the country. Clearly he knows what the fuck he is doing politically. Especially when it comes to beating Donald Trump, which he also did.
Going on:
Also think it’s coincidental that the sentencing hearing is 4 days before the RNC. Honestly they should have done this 4 years ago when he left office instead of confidently waiting until 6 months before the election. And again I’m not stroking trumps ego on this but I think it’s just in time that now the biden campaign can put ads out talking about how Trump is a convicted felon etc etc.
The sentencing was decided by Judge Merchan. And what exactly will it do when it happens four days before the Republican National Convention? Will they fail to nominate Trump? Will this ruin his run to the November election?
No, seriously: why not point out that it is a week after the Fourth of July? Or on John Quincy Adams’s birthday — and also Giorgio Armani’s? This is another attempt at argument just by unclear innuendo. I don’t know what Trump’s sentencing is supposed to do to affect the RNC, but my best guess is that it will rile them all up and they’ll spend three days screaming about a witch hunt while falling in line behind DJT as the GOP nominee.
In terms of the case going to trial four years ago: Cyrus Vance had to sue Donald Trump to get his tax returns. Twice. And it went all the way to the Supreme Court. And then Trumps’ lawyers delayed this in every possible way — and it was delayed quite a bit by the fact that the COVID pandemic backlogged all of the courts for years. (PRETTY CONVENIENT THAT DONALD TRUMP DIDN’T DO ANYTHING TO STOP THE PANDEMIC AND IT DELAYED HIS TRIAL, HUH??? See? I can argue by innuendo too.) That’s why it took so long. I’m sure they would have loved to try it in 2019 — except for the fact that would have meant trying a sitting president, and honestly, maybe that would have been kinda bad.
Is Biden going to make hay out of Trump being a convicted felon? Absolutely. But you know who else is capitalizing on it?
And there’s another factor here, which connects to all of these points about the timing and how Biden will use this conviction, and so on. Sure: it may be convenient when your opponent’s crimes or scandals or whatever show up — but that doesn’t mean they didn’t happen. Your opponent’s mistakes or wrongdoings are certainly good for you, but that in no way shows that you made them up: it only shows that you took advantage of circumstances, or your opponent’s failures, as anyone would and should in a competition. Do we think the tortoise made the hare take a nap? No: it’s not your fault if your opponent fucks up. It doesn’t mean you made those scandals happen, or drummed up false charges for those crimes. It doesn’t mean the opponent was framed. Not even if you personally have the power to persecute someone, and falsely accuse them of crimes. To show that that happened, someone would need actual evidence that Trump was not guilty of doing what he was accused of.
And did you notice? The one claim that was missing from all of these arguments about this trial?
That Trump was innocent. That he didn’t do anything.
We all know he did it. We all know it was criminal. It’s just a question of whether he should pay, and how much he should pay.
The first answer is emphatically, categorically, YES.
The second question is more to be debated and determined. But it should be determined using facts, using reason, not innuendo and implication and misinformation and lies.
Then we can have something that is not a crock of shit.
I understand if you don’t want to discuss the election that will take place later this year. I sympathize, I absolutely do.
But I’m going to talk about it. And I’m going to ask you to listen, even if you don’t want to — or really, to read, even if you don’t want to. I’m going to ask that you take a deep breath, let it out, say out loud — as loudly as you can — “I don’t want to think about this” (and if you are so inclined, add “shit” at the end of that sentence).
And then read what I have to say. Because it’s important. Not because I’m saying it: I’m just a regular guy, smarter than some and not as smart as others; good with words but far from the best; aware and knowledgeable in some ways and deeply ignorant in others. Just a regular guy. But the topic is important, which is why I’m writing about it — even though I don’t really want to. I want to take a break from writing: I just finished editing my book. I want to take a break from politics: I’ve been much too closely involved in the subject for way too long now.
But this election, this November? It’s a big one. That’s not to say it is the only important election; all elections are important, to some people, for some reason. But this one is important to all of us. And I mean ALL of us: this one has literal global implications, pretty serious ones. It’s our responsibility as people to be decent to each other, to try not to harm each other, to try to help each other; and in this case, that means we need to talk about the election in November, and we need to think about it, and then we need to do the right thing. Or else we are not living up to our responsibilities as human beings. I don’t want to be that person, and I presume you don’t, either — or else you’ve already clicked away from this, and you’re not reading these words right now.
(By the way: if you clicked away, it doesn’t mean you’re not a decent person; but if you’re not a decent person, you’ve definitely clicked away. Because I’m gonna get all woke and try to shame you, and you don’t put up with that kind of shit. But getting all bunched up about being woke-shamed? That means you’re an asshole. Not to say that woke-shaming is good; I have people who try to woke-shame me, and it’s obnoxious; but I put up with it because I’m not an asshole. If you’re still here, you’re at least tolerant, and therefore not an asshole.)
I’m not actually going to woke-shame you, by the way. Because I don’t need to. You don’t need to be a woke liberal snowflake to recognize the right thing to do in this election. That’s the point of this post: I’m not even talking about my opinions about what is best for this country, or the best choice to make in November; I may talk about that some — I plan to get into the best choice in the next post. But for this one, it is simple, it is stark, it is clear: it is black and white.
Vote No on Donald J. Trump for President of the United States.
Now, I get it: I’m tired, too. I’m tired of the political game the two parties play, where you have to vote for OUR candidate because THEIR candidate is SO MUCH WORSE. We have to vote for the lesser of two evils, and it’s exhausting and depressing to never vote for anyone with some actual hope in our hearts. Honestly, that’s why the last two presidents — not the current one — got elected: because people felt hopeful about their candidacies. Obama was inspiring; Trump was energizing — for different sections of the society, of course. People who were inspired by Obama did not find Trump energizing. But in both cases, Obama and Trump offered something different from the usual kind of political candidate, and that newness had a lot to do with how they won. And I hate, I loathe, that the Democratic party, rather than taking an opportunity to back a candidate who had some new ideas, who had some integrity and consistency, and who inspired some of the same energy in their electorate — Bernie Sanders — went sprinting straight back to a 50-year Washington insider, an old white male politician who has literally never inspired anyone to do anything.
But we’ll talk about ol’ Sleepy Joe next time. This time we have to talk about the other old white male politician running for this election. The dangerous one.
This guy.
Trump will only be a dictator on Day One
No, no, I know he was kidding. Of course he was; he says that he has two intentions on day one, for which he claims he would use power dictatorially: to close the border, and to drill, drill, drill (for oil). “After that,” he says, “I’m not a dictator.” Totally harmless. I shouldn’t take things so seriously, especially not when Trump says them, right? He’s just kidding around. Just a lil funnin’.
But let’s be clear. First of all, in terms of the joke, Sean Hannity set that up as a serious question, saying “Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody.” When Trump drops his joke, there is a clear moment of horror, because he didn’t say “Absolutely.” He didn’t say “Of course I would never do that.” He didn’t say “In America we believe in the rule of law and in democracy, so I would never act like a dictator in any way.” He said “Except on day one.” In a moment when he was asked for sincerity, for honesty, for a promise to the American people: he made a joke. A joke about being a dictator.
And considering it realistically, it seems perfectly reasonable to assume that he is sincere in his two intentions to use power dictatorially: to close the border, which would mean violating dozens of laws and international treaties and disrupting the lives of millions (because I assume by “close the border” he means stop allowing people to cross the border, including innocent legal travelers; or else he means send overwhelming military force to stop all illegal crossings at the southern border, while also defying due process in order to build some ridiculous wall covered in electrified barbed wire and anti-personnel mines filled with Sarin gas and anthrax: either way he would be breaking the law and disrupting the lives of millions.), and defying all science in order to destroy the environment while feeding money into the bottomless maw of the fossil fuel industry: also in violation of who knows how many laws and policies of our own government. Of course he is serious about that: those are two of the “policies” (To be clear, he has no policy positions or plans at all; he’s running purely on hate and lies) he is running on, which are both very popular: fuck everyone who isn’t already American (by which we all know he means “white”), and fuck the environment and everyone who cares about it.
I refuse to then believe, subsequent to misusing presidential power for these two issues, that he would not immediately misuse presidential power to do what he does not tell Sean Hannity, what he does not promise the American people, that he would never do: seek retribution against his perceived enemies. Because of course he would do that: it’s all he ever does. He did it while he was in office, he has tried to do it since; he ran on the promise that he would lock up Hillary Clinton, and he is running now on the promise that he will weaponize the DOJ and FBI and go after all of his enemies, while filling the government with people loyal to him.
You know all this, right? I mean, I know we’re all tired of listening to him speak, and we’re exhausted by the constant news cycle of the whatever is the most recent travesty he said aloud — a news cycle that has gone on uninterrupted for the last nine years, since Trump declared himself a candidate for the Presidency — but still, the information is everywhere, the facts are unavoidable.
I’ve been avoiding writing this post because I can’t think of anything new to say. Every time I think, “I need to write that post about why people should vote against Trump, why people should fight Trump’s reelection,” I then think, “But what will I say?”
What can I tell you that you don’t already know?
What insight can I offer into the threat that Trump poses that you’re not already aware of?
But if you know everything that I know about Trump, why the fuck is he leading in the polls???
Seriously, I cannot fathom this. It has been driving me nuts. I keep telling people my opinion: Trump hasn’t done anything to make himself more popular, so he can’t possibly be more successful in this election than he was in the last — which he lost, as I hope everyone reading this is painfully, exhaustively aware. But every time I say that, smart people around me say, “I dunno, man. He’s leading in the polls.” Every time I open a newsletter or listen to an episode of my favorite political podcast, Unfucking the Republic, the host is saying he expects Trump to win this next election. Trump. To win. Not cheat his way into the White House like he already did in 2016, not lead an insurrection to take control of the country like he tried to do in 2021, but win. The election. With votes. From Americans.
I know you have to sign in to watch this, but do it. For me. And for America.
This is about something else, but the lyrics are apropos. Plus it slaps.
I honestly don’t know how to deal with this. I know I’m not alone: listen to Jonathan Capeheart coming a hair’s breadth away from just losing his shit in this interview with Presidential historian Michael Beschloss, about 2:45:
(The Black, gay, liberal MSNBC host clearly has reason to lose his shit, as he expresses later in the clip.)
Okay, I understand some of the issue here. I get that if 44,000 votes, out of 150,000,000, had gone the other way, then Trump would have won reelection. And actually, I get that if he had, a number of people think things would have gone better, or at least not much worse, over the last three years; they’re wrong, but I can’t disprove a hypothetical any more than they can prove it, so I can accept that people believe it. It pisses me off that people mock the opposition to Trump by saying the only reason we don’t like him is because he was too mean on Twitter, like there aren’t a thousand reasons to despise Donald Trump and what happened during his administration (Top ten: insurrection; impeachment; second impeachment; The Big Lie; 6-3 Conservative SCOTUS; COVID non-response; tax cut for the rich and $8 TRILLION added to the deficit; “Very fine people on both sides” and also the trans ban for the military; pulling out of the JCPOA and Paris Treaty and shit-talking NATO and all other treaties; and it wasn’t part of his presidency, but I’m not going to ignore all of his sexual assaults) — but I understand that people believe lies about all of those things, or those things at least align with things they do believe. And I mock the other side for their stupidity, so I can accept that they mock me for what they perceive as mine.
I know that, in conjunction with what I’ve just been saying, the country is so divided along partisan lines that people would generally vote for a disease-carrying mosquito rather than cross party lines; and that means any GOP nominee can count on 200 or so electoral votes, just as any Democratic nominee can count on 200 or so different electoral votes, and while Trump has only gotten worse over the last four years, so has inflation, which people blame Biden for. They shouldn’t, but again, I don’t know how to prove that, either. If you don’t know that corporate profits and supply chain issues were responsible for the inflation of the last three years, then you’re not paying attention — or you’re paying attention to the wrong things. (Best line from the article at that last link: “It is unlikely that either the extent of corporate greed or even the power of corporations generally has increased during the past two years. Instead, the already-excessive power of corporations has been channeled into raising prices rather than the more traditional form it has taken in recent decades: suppressing wages.”) I know that our country is awash in lies about socialism and government takeovers. I know, also, that there are people who vehemently believe in Great Replacement theory, the conspiracy theory which claims Democrats (Or even better, the “global elite” led by Jewish people) are bringing dark-skinned people into this country to replace white people, because one of them yelled at me on Facebook not too long ago.
I know that people are not excited about voting for Biden. I hoped he wouldn’t run, too — but come on. Let’s not pretend that anyone who decides to be President doesn’t already have an ego that needs its own West Wing. You can’t be an ordinary person and believe that you would be the right individual, the only right individual, to lead this entire country. You have to think you are the greatest ever. That’s why we have term limits in the first place: because after FDR, who clearly believed himself to be the only person who could ever run this country, believed it strongly enough to run FOUR TIMES, we recognized that it was genuinely unlikely that a modern President would give up power. And look at how they all run for that second term. All of them. (Quick tip of the hat to LBJ for backing out of a second run because he thought the country was too divided over his war in Vietnam) So we all knew he would try for the nomination again — and if the DNC backed him over Bernie in 2020, why would they stop backing him now?
I want to talk more about voting for Biden, because he’s actually done an outstanding job as president; but that’s not the topic for today.
The topic for today is voting No on the question of whether Donald J. Trump should once again be President of the United States.
This is our duty. It is our responsibility, both for the sake of our country and our democracy, but also for the sake of the world. Everybody, literally, is counting on us to stop this asshole from fucking up everything in this country that he hasn’t already fucked up.
I know we don’t like voting for the lesser of two evils, so let me put it this way: I’m not asking you to vote for the lesser of two evils. I’m asking you to vote against evil.
I don’t actually care how you do that. I think the safest course is to vote for Biden, because in our winner-take-all electoral college system, voting third party is potentially dangerous; but if you want to vote for Jill Stein or Cornell West, please do so. I’d love to see the Green Party gain more national attention, and I think Dr. West is far and away the best candidate running right now. (Oh — don’t vote for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Libertarians are dangerous, particularly when they are also anti-vax. And he is the worst kind of anti-vax. Don’t give him a platform, please.) But what matters is taking away votes from Donald Trump, so if you were going to vote for the Democrat and you don’t want to vote for Biden, be aware that taking your vote away from Biden is not voting No on Trump. It is voting No on Biden. You are welcome to do that, as I said, especially if you live in a safely blue state like New York or California; but you first need to vote No on Trump.
Vote No on Trump by giving a political donation to the Democratic party. Vote No on Trump by volunteering to help the Democrats get voters out and registered and to the polls — which is still what I plan to do, now that MY BOOK IS FINISHED and now I have time to do that. Vote No on Trump by convincing a would-be Trump voter to change and vote for someone else (They can even vote for RFK, because if he pulls votes from the GOP he’ll never get conservative backing again, and that would be swell.). Vote No on Trumpism, as well, by supporting those who oppose him: vote Democratic or Green or Progressive or left-leaning Independent on all of the downticket races; pay for and consume media that does not support the Trumpiverse view of things.
Or vote No on Trump by voting for Biden, even if you don’t like or agree with him, because in our system, Joe Biden has far and away the best chance to stop Trump from becoming President again.
This isn’t a matter of picking between two identical puppets run by the same political machine. It’s certainly true that the moderates of both parties are frequently indistinguishable in their actual governance, even if their rhetoric has contrasts; but the Republican party has had to fall in line behind Trump — and they have done it. They are obedient acolytes, they are foot soldiers, drones, servants of their Beloved Leader. Trump knows it, and he pushes them around at will; he will, of course, continue doing it as President — because while he may be a lame duck president, he will continue to apply pressure to the members of his party; he will anoint the chosen and castigate the insufficiently loyal: and all of them, it seems, will dance to his tune. Biden may be a puppet of the powers-that-be, and that is dangerous; but he’s not the puppet master, and Trump is. (Even though Trump himself may be controlled by others, either autocrats like Putin and Netanyahu and Kim, whom he somehow needs to impress, or anyone with power enough to gain access, and brains enough to manipulate that goddamn idiot.) If we retain Biden and those who have influence over him, it won’t lead to the collapse of this country’s democracy. Trump’s election might. I won’t say he definitely will turn himself into a dictator and end American democracy entirely — but I also won’t definitely say he won’t do that. He is a danger to this country, and because we are the richest, most powerful, and also the most toxic country in the world, Trump is therefore a danger to everyone — look no further than Avdiivka for that.
We all know that all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. Donald Trump is evil. Whatever else you think of him or about him, his intentions, his corruption, and his ability to do harm through the office of the Presidency are far too great for any of us to ignore. So please: do something. \
Vote No on Donald J. Trump for President of the United States.
I don’t. And it’s vital that we understand the argument, even if we don’t agree with it; agreement is not necessary, compromise can be reached, solutions can be found even if we don’t agree.
But if we don’t understand? Then what do we do?
“We believe that the state governor has gone beyond his constitutional authority in shutting down businesses and ordering people to stay at home,” organiser Tyler Miller tells me from the grounds of the state capitol.
In mid-March Washington Governor Jay Inslee announced an emergency proclamation mirroring many issued around the world; closing restaurants and bars and banning large gatherings.
But protestors say that was unconstitutional.
“The state constitution says that the right of the people to peaceably assemble shall never be abridged. We believe that the (emergency coronavirus) proclamations that the governor here ordered violate that,” Mr Miller says.
Mr Miller said he was not protesting against the recommendations from the public health bodies and respected the need to ‘flatten the curve’.
“I even self-quarantined for 14 days back at the very beginning of this myself, when I had an illness that mirrored some of the symptoms,” he says.
“The fact I am protesting does not mean I think it is a good idea to have gatherings, I just believe that the government has no authority to prohibit them.”
Throughout the crisis, Mr Miller has also been able to continue his work as an engineering technician with the navy.
He says the thing that has angered him is what he feels it is an un-American overreach of power by the Democratic governor of Washington.
I don’t understand that argument.
There is a simpler argument, which is just that people are getting desperate: the country has been shut down in places for more than a month now, and people are facing another rent payment, another car payment, on May 1st, this coming Friday. I understand that desperation, that anxiety; I understand and (mainly) support the desire to let government officials know that you need and demand action. I think it’s a mistake to violate social distancing guidelines, and there are people in the article above and others I have seen who say things like “I have a strong immune system, I take care of myself,” who I think are somewhere between ignorant and idiotic: ignorant if they don’t know that Covid-19 has killed young and healthy people as well as older, sicker people; idiotic if they believe unfounded statements (Mostly from conservative “news” sources) that the novel coronavirus is no worse than the flu.
(This may be too harsh: this is an interesting article about how we are wired to be intuitive, and so underestimate the evidence that comes from outside our experience. I know I was telling my students in March that any shutdown of schools would only last a couple of weeks and would certainly not affect their graduation. On the other hand, I am not saying the same thing now, because I have learned better; I’m not sure why these people haven’t, but my two options above are certainly possibilities.
(Also, this ad popped up in that same article about people being too optimistic. Lol.
(If you believe not only that a miracle stretch relieves years of back pain, but also that chiropractors are stunned by it, AND that chiropractors are the authority whose stunning represents a medical breakthrough, then you are unquestionably in this overly-optimistic bunch.)
But while I understand and sympathize with people who are desperate to get back to work and pay their bills, and I believe (and am infuriated) that the federal government has once again bailed out large corporations with deep political donation pockets and left average citizens to twist in the wind, I don’t understand the other argument. The freedom argument.
I don’t think it’s a reasonable argument.
Listen. I worry about government overreach. I won’t say I’m learned in history, but I know about the Japanese internment camps during World War II, and I know some things about the rise of the various authoritarian dictatorships that plagued the 20th century. I have hated the USA PATRIOT Act since it was imposed on us, during the paranoid jingoist nationalist fervor that swept the country after 9/11 and swept us into a neverending war. I know that it gets renewed every time it comes up because the government doesn’t like to give away power that it has seized. Because of that experience, I have been pointing out to my friends who argue against the lockdowns that the thing we need to worry about is the powers the government arrogates to itself after the crisis: the new regulations and limitations, and invasions of citizens’ rights, that follow a partial return to normalcy, and that are intended to prevent this kind of thing from ever happening again. We have to watch out for the permanent changes, or for the attempts, often subtle and underhanded, to make temporary changes permanent.
I don’t doubt those will happen. I think the first attempt will be by President Trump, when he decides to make his temporary limit on immigration permanent.
But see, I think that because Mr. Trump has a long history of a clearly established position to end immigration. I think that because I have read reports that Trump’s anti-immigration advisors have talked about this pause into something more long lasting. Because this article quotes DHS acting secretary, Chad Wolf, as saying to Fox News that
his agency will soon recommend a move to limit temporary work visas as well.
“That is something that the department has been looking at for the past several months, so we are well underway and look forward to presenting to the President those recommendations for additional steps,” said Wolf.
So there’s your government overreach, as part of an established pattern of behavior, aiming at known long-term targets. After the fact. Once the danger has passed. The current actions are not government overreach: they are government responding as government should to a crisis. The stay-at-home orders were issued during a crisis, and in line with scientific facts and the advice of experts. This is exactly when, and exactly why, people’s rights can and should be limited. We have the right to protest, but if you decided to walk into a burning building in order to protest the fire, people would stop you: and they would be right to. We have the right to freedom of speech, and of assembly, but you cannot gather with an army and plan the destruction of the United States: the right is to peaceably assemble, and free speech does not include sedition or criminal conspiracy. Individual rights are not limitless, not under any circumstances; even the most libertarian of us would state clearly that one person’s rights cannot be permitted to infringe on another’s, that your right to swing your fist stops where my nose begins. And of course individual rights are limited in an emergency, because the free exercise of one’s rights puts others into danger.
This is what government is for: to protect people from danger. Now, if you want to argue that the coronavirus is not that dangerous, then you’re in the wrong place. Start with this.
(Especially that last one; it’s about the infectiousness of the coronavirus. And lest you think that the infectiousness of Covid-19 is lower than SARS or MERS, both of which caused fewer problems and killed fewer people, go back and read those other articles again, and then also pay attention to this quote from that last article:
“An R0 value of 1 means the average person who gets that disease will transmit it to one other person; in that case, the disease is spreading at a stable rate. An R0 of more than 1 means the disease spreads exponentially.”
As I said, the government has the right and the responsibility to limit individual freedoms in response to a crisis, in order to protect the people from that crisis. (I’m aware that some people don’t agree with this: some because they don’t think the coronavirus is a crisis, and if you still think that, go back and read the above articles, but this time with your eyes open; and some because they think that nothing should ever limit individual rights under any circumstances: my above examples of protesting inside a burning building, or convening an army to overthrow the US government, are just fine, for them. I will be writing another blog about that. I’ll let you know when it’s done. The important thing is that, while I don’t agree with that argument, I understand it.) I think, though, that the basic argument behind the protests, the reason that President Trump tweeted support for people trying to “liberate” the states that have both lockdown orders and Democratic governors, is that the government is not trying to protect people from the crisis: the government is trying to control people. To take away their freedom. that’s the argument I don’t understand.
(I am also not going to write here about the elephant in the room, namely the upcoming election and the similarities — remarked on in the BBC article I linked first — between the anti-lockdown protests and Trump rallies. People who are going to the rallies just to support President Trump are certainly not reading this, and are not worth the time to put forward an argument. President Trump is probably trying to use the rallies as a way to hype his base up for the election, but he also said that he thinks Georgia Governor Brian Kemp is opening his state too soon, so I’m not going to jump on Trump today. We’ll see what happens tomorrow. Also: I understand this argument.)
But here’s the thing with tyranny: it makes sense. There is reason behind it.
That’s what’s missing from the freedom argument of the protests.
Break it down. Think it through. Okay, the government — pardon me, the govment (Read this article that I wish I wrote) — limits people’s rights to assemble and move freely, to run a business and participate in the free market economy. Because they want to establish tyrannical control over the free people of these United States.
Why?
I understand that the government has taken on, for most of the people who support these protests, the aura of Darth Sidious and the Sith: evil just for the sake of evil; power hungry just for the sake of power. But, see, that’s a character from a movie franchise, and it’s not a realistic one. I admit, if the Democratic governors were trying to raise a clone army from a mysterious source; or they were trying to corrupt a Jedi knight with incredible power but terrible self-control, then I would see the danger.
Why would the Democrats, or the government in general, want to lock people inside? I saw someone argue that the Democrats exaggerated the danger of Covid-19 in order to justify the lockdown expressly so they could destroy Trump’s economy, because that’s the only way they could beat him in the next election.
Come on.
(An argument I have seen but will not be rebutting is that Andrew Cuomo of New York exaggerated the need for ventilators so he could get…a huge excess of ventilators. Sure. As you do. He’s going to put them in one huge room and then go swimming in them like Scrooge McDuck. Swimming through the ventilators.)
First of all, there’s no way that an economy ruined by Democrats would be pinned on Trump. Trump is already positioning himself to argue that it was the Democrats who did the harm in this crisis. (Elephant in the room…) If this is provably true, if Covid-19 is really not that bad and the Democrats have exaggerated the danger, we’ll know it before November, and this Dem gambit will fail. Secondly, and more important, if they ruin the economy, they not only have no hope of winning the next election, but they lose access to the money. If the Democrats, or the government in general, are corrupt, they want money. Money does not come from enforcing a stay-at-home order. We are all losing money, including the government. I know they are flinging money around like it’s meaningless paper (…), but there is a limit to that because at some point the economy will actually collapse, and the more they spend now the closer that outcome gets: and why would anyone in power want that? To destroy the economy that underpins the entire system they are ostensibly seeking to control? Nonsense. There are people who want the government and the entire society to collapse, but they are not the ones in power: they are the ones without power. That’s why they want the system to collapse, because they don’t currently gain from it. The ones in the system, the Democrats in Washington and the state capitals, very much want this current system to survive, even if they are corrupt, because this system is how those corrupt people get what they want. The corrupt actions the Democrats take (And yes, many Democrats are corrupt; not all of them or only them, but yes they are.) are clearly intended to increase their wealth and their ability to stay in their current positions so they can continue increasing their wealth. That’s why we still don’t have term limits or meaningful campaign finance reform. Nobody wants to make the money go away, least of all corrupt Washington politicians.
So what’s the reasoning? Because the Democrats are secretly anti-American communists? Okay, let me try to address the idea of Dems seeking power for power’s sake; I still think that sounds like the Sith, but sure, let’s imagine that they are simply evil and that’s their reasoning. Communists, or anyone trying to overthrow the government, would be trying to seize the reins of power. They would be going after the sources of power, trying to control those so they could then get the next source of power, and so on; it’s like Risk. You conquer territory that lets you conquer more territory. You don’t just act arbitrarily, you seek the means of control. In this country, the means of control are (in no particular order): violence and force; the ballot; information; and money.
Which of those things are the Sith-Democrats gaining through the lockdown? Not money; I already talked about that. (Sure, the government is giving money to corporations, who paid the politicians. But those corporations make more money in an open economy. The same goes for people arguing that the government is trying to make people dependent on government handouts rather than their own paychecks: the money will run out if the economy doesn’t open. then the system collapses and the people in power lose.) Greater control over information? If there are secret things going on that we can’t see because we’re all staying home, then I take all of this back and apologize; let me know if the clone army executes order 66, or the Final Order fleet rises from Exegol. Otherwise the press has not seemed limited by the lockdown, and I don’t really see how it would be; limiting reporters’ physical movements seems a loser’s gamble in a world of the Internet and drones with cameras. The ballot? I mean, we’ll see when the election comes, but at the moment, the lockdown seems to play more into Republican hands because it limits voters’ access to the ballot box, which tends to favor conservative politicians.
Does the lockdown give the government more ability to commit violence, more ability to use force against the people? I honestly can’t see how. I mean, I guess they could be trying to force us to obey so we get more used to obeying, so that the next time they give us an irrational and arbitrary order, we’ll obey just because that’s what we do now. But if that were the case, they wouldn’t be using Covid-19 as their cover. Because that gives us a reason, and that means they’ll need to have another reason, as good as this one, to support their next attempt to tell us to stay home: that progression only works with weaker and weaker justifications. Using a global pandemic is not a weak justification; quite the opposite. (And notice that even this one isn’t working…) Read 1984: O’Brien wants Winston to not only tell him he sees five fingers, he wants him to actually see five fingers; and that’s the only reason Winston gets for the months of torture he undergoes. He is very intentionally not given a reason to obey Big Brother: he just has to do it, or else he suffers. In this case, if we don’t obey, it’s not that we suffer the wrath of the government — it’s that we get sick. (And this is true.) If you want to create a totalitarian state, you need to create loyalty to the state without reason: loyalty to the state based on an emergency doesn’t cut it. Because the loyalty ends when the emergency does.
Now: if this lockdown turns out to continue past when the virus disappears. Or if the virus doesn’t disappear, either because the press is controlled and doesn’t report the true numbers of the disease (And I know people think that is happening, but I’m talking about the press saying there are thousands of cases when there are none, not the medical authorities miscounting the thousands of cases that are in existence; if anything we are undercounting the actual cases, and we all know it.), or because the government takes actions that continue the spread of the coronavirus (I mean, maybe tweeting support for protests that seem to be increasing the chances of the disease spreading would qualify as that?). Then I will agree that this is an attempt to establish tyranny. But you see what the actually despotic actions are there? Enforcing control over freedom of movement when there is no crisis. Controlling the press. Actually using biological warfare, directly or indirectly, against the people. Those are tyrannical actions.
Asking people to stay home is not tyranny. It’s concern. Even if you think it is unfounded concern, I don’t see any reasonable way to argue that it is anything other than concern.
But you know what really concerns me?
People are acting based on this argument. This argument that doesn’t seem to have any real rational basis. It honestly seems to be just “You can’t tell us what to do. Not even if it’s in my best interest.” Rebellion for rebellion’s sake. Cowboy shit. Cowboy shit that has no particular goal, no particular target; it’s just people wanting to act like cowboys. Rebels. March and wave flags. That doesn’t make any sense: but people are still doing it.
The fact that I can’t figure out the argument doesn’t concern me as much as the fact that people seem willing to act even though they don’t understand why they are acting. That’s irrational.
I don’t know how to argue with irrational people.
Even worse, I don’t know how to live in the same country with them.
People say this country is founded on the rule of law, or on the Constitution, or even on the will of God; none of that is true. It was founded on reason. The argument for the Constitution and the rule of law is reasonable, it is rational; it makes sense. The way the Constitution sets up our government is rational, every aspect of it. Hundreds of reasonable people argued — argued! Gave reasons and explanations! Appealing to the intellect of their opponents! — for years to write it. Some of the arguments were wrong, and some of the beliefs were wrong; the people making the Constitution were imperfect, and had some bad reasons, which should give way to better reasons over time — but that’s the system they set up, one in which better arguments, better reasons, will win out over worse ones. It’s all founded on reason.
The country can live through any danger, even the coronavirus. But it can’t live through the death of reason.
That’s what scares me. That’s why I want to understand, because if I can understand, I know that my opponents, even if they are wrong, are still listening to reason, and that means there’s hope.
So Lamar Alexander is going to vote with the GOP. Which means that despite Mitt Romney and Susan Collins (And ten’ll get you five that she would have changed her vote to the party line at the last minute) saying we should have witnesses in the Senate trial, Mitch McConnell still has enough votes to block witnesses and acquit Trump of wrongdoing. Which he will do in the next 24 hours.
Of course.
Alexander made a statement critical of the President’s actions, of course. Because he wants to be seen as moral, even as he abdicates all responsibility, all semblance of actually doing his job and adhering to the oath he took. Nobody likes admitting that they’re doing the wrong thing. Even when they are doing the wrong thing.
Oh — President Obama did the wrong thing when he used drone strikes to kill Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists, especially because there were civilian casualties, and especially because he targeted American citizens. He did the wrong thing when he refused to close Guantanamo and either try or release the accused terrorists imprisoned there. He did the wrong thing when he — okay, I can’t think of a third thing. I think he probably did the wrong thing when he pulled troops out of Iraq and allowed ISIS room to grow; and he probably did the wrong thing when he refused to send troops into Syria to stop Assad from using chemical weapons, and he did the wrong thing when he allowed the CIA to help overthrow Gaddafi in Libya. But I think any intervention in foreign wars is probably wrong. You can make a case for intervening to end brutal dictatorships, but it’s tough to maintain that case when we’ve not intervened in either North Korea nor Rwanda, so. It’s easiest to say that American foreign policy smacks of jingoistic imperialism, capitalist exploitation, and colonialist arrogance, and therefore is troubling even when the goals are good.
Of course.
Alan Dershowitz is wrong: the idea that abuse of power is not impeachable because anything done in the public interest, according to the president’s understanding of that, can at worst be seen as misgovernance, which the Founding Fathers clearly refused to allow as grounds for impeachment and removal — that as long as President Trump thinks he’s doing what’s best for the country, and not committing any officially illegal acts like witness tampering, he commits no impeachable offenses — is ridiculous. It’s almost cute, because the President’s defense team is arguing that the House impeachment rests on reading the President’s mind, and knowing what he intended to do and why, because his actions by themselves are not impeachable (Mostly because no official crime, but also because according to them Trump did nothing wrong in that perfect phone call — it’s wild to watch smart people shift their stance daily, almost hourly, and still refuse to admit their case is weak); but: Dershowitz et al. knowing that the President thought what he was doing was in the public interest is also somehow reading his mind. Unless they have evidence as to the President’s specific, provable intention with his perfect phone call, in which case, that evidence should be brought forward and examined. Maybe call John Bolton, or something.
But they won’t. Because this is not a real trial. It’s not a real adherence to the Constitution and the law. Of course not. You can tell because they’re arguing that bullying an ally into mudslinging to win an election is somehow not abuse of power. Or that it is abuse of power, but that it isn’t impeachable — which is amazing, because that means there is some level, and in this instance it’s a pretty high bar, of acceptable abuse of power.
Abuse of power has to be impeachable. You can argue that it’s a vague category of offense, but so is the “specific” wording in the Constitution: “Treason, bribery, or other High crimes and misdemeanors.” Treason is betrayal of the United States, but what does that mean? If you do something like, I don’t know, start a trade war that ruins American manufacturing and farming just as those industries are pulling out of a recession, is that a betrayal of this country? Or how about betraying a longtime ally in a critical military operation, by pulling out troops so that their longtime enemy can move across an international border and bomb the shit out of innocent civilians? Is that a betrayal of the country? Is that treason? Is it bribery if you accept money from foreign heads of state who rent rooms at your hotel? How about if you put in place as ambassador to the EU some random schmoe who gave you a million dollars? Is that bribery? (Of course it is.)
Would it be a high crime and misdemeanor if the President shot someone on 5th Avenue?
What if he had sex with a 21-year-old intern and then denied it under oath? Would that be a betrayal of the country? Is that treason?
And the point is, it’s a judgment call. There is no clear and well-defined standard of what is and is not corrupt because corruption comes in as many potential forms as there are people. I have changed grades because it was funny. Seriously: I had a student make some snarky comment about how grammar didn’t matter, except he spelled it “grammer,” and I gave him +1 for irony. That’s corrupt. It’s a betrayal of the trust put in me to grade my students to the best of my ability and with perfect honesty and integrity. I think it’s a minor infraction, but — that’s subjective, isn’t it?
Of course it is.
Abuse of power is the whole point of impeachment and removal from office. It has to be impeachable, and it has to be left vague so that it can be interpreted to fit the context of the present situation. Abuse of power is the definition of “high crimes and Misdemeanors,” a phrase taken from English common law and used to describe someone who betrayed an oath of office and the public trust placed in him, but who did not necessarily break any legal statute. I recommend you read the Wikipedia article on this, actually; very illuminating. My favorite part is this:
Benjamin Franklin asserted that the power of impeachment and removal was necessary for those times when the Executive “rendered himself obnoxious,” and the Constitution should provide for the “regular punishment of the Executive when his conduct should deserve it, and for his honorable acquittal when he should be unjustly accused.” James Madison said that “impeachment… was indispensable” to defend the community against “the incapacity, negligence or perfidy of the chief Magistrate.” With a single executive, Madison argued, unlike a legislature whose collective nature provided security, “loss of capacity or corruption was more within the compass of probable events, and either of them might be fatal to the Republic.”[9]
I mean, Trump “rendered himself obnoxious” before he even took office, so. The Democrats who have sought to impeach him from day one have always been correct. I think the case for negligence and corruption, both potentially fatal to the Republic, is even easier to prove in this case. The goal is not to find the perfect set of rules and restrictions, definitions and elaborations, that will stop only those specific crimes that constitute an impeachable offense; it is to put our trust, the public trust, into our elected officials to hear the evidence, weigh the facts, and make a decision.
Of course.
Let me just boil all of this down, rather than getting too deep into the arguments. This is really, really easy stuff.
Trump did the thing. It was a violation of the public trust because we expect that the President not do anything in office expressly to benefit himself personally; and especially not fuck with an ally in danger: we expect that he not fuck with military aid intended to protect several allies from one of the world’s more dangerous countries. That’s an abuse of power, and it’s impeachable, and he should be impeached and removed.
He won’t be, of course. Because the GOP is becoming more and more obedient to a single, specific goal, which is “Fuck the liberals.” That’s what really got Trump elected — because I know there were a hundred reasons why the moderates and independents and disillusioned Democrats voted for Trump, and plenty of reasons why people voted against Clinton, and the Electoral College is the only reason Trump’s lost popular vote put him in office, but when you get down to it, if 30 million or so angry fucking Republicans hadn’t voted for him from the outset, those other things wouldn’t have mattered — and the harder Republicans work to keep him in office and get him reelected, the more they are showing their loyalty to exactly that base, and exactly that credo. Republican congressmen and Senators are toeing the line because they’re afraid of being primaried, afraid that someone will show up in their districts who is more credible when they say “Fuck the liberals,” and will take their job away. And they’re right, that’s exactly what would happen; because Trump’s base votes to fuck the liberals. That’s it.
You can tell that this is their fundamental idea because every single argument about Trump and what he has done comes back to liberals (mostly Obama) doing worse. You say that Trump is abusing his power, and they say that Obama abused his with executive orders. You say that Trump is hurting our national reputation, they say that Obama did worse when he bowed, or went on his “apology tour.” You say that Trump is a rapist, they say so was Clinton.
All of those are terrible arguments. If you accuse me of murder and I say “Well Ted Bundy killed WAY more people than me!” it doesn’t mean anything other than “Fuck you.” And that’s all I’ve been hearing this entire time, ever since the whistleblower tried to do the right thing: Trump isn’t as corrupt as Biden, he didn’t hurt Ukraine as much as Obama did by not providing actual weapons to fight Russia, the GOP bullshit tactics aren’t as bad as Adam Schiff. All they’re saying is that your side is just as bad as your side; and if they then don’t go on to say “Wow, that’s fucked up and we should fix both sides,” their real belief is that your side (the liberal side) is worse simply because we’re liberals. So even if what Obama did isn’t comparable to what Trump did in an absolute sense (And it’s not: comparing clear criminal acts and abuse of power to actual policy decisions, even policy decisions you hate, is just bullshit.), it’s worse because Obama did it. Because he’s a liberal. Of course.
I did realize the other day that there’s a fundamental difference in opinion that changes how people see this impeachment. I don’t think anyone really believes Trump when he says he did nothing wrong; I am positive that no one believes President Zelenskiy of Ukraine when he says there was no pressure; when the teacher comes across the bully in the middle of applying an atomic wedgie, and the victim says, “No, sir, nothing wrong here; we’re just playing around,” you don’t believe that kid. You know better. Zelenskiy still needs the military aid and the goodwill of the US, and as Trump has made abundantly clear to him since last July, that means doing whatever makes President Trump happy, and fuck everyone else in America. So Zelenskiy is lying to suck up to the bully. Of course.
Tell me that’s not an abuse of his power. Tell me he’s working in the public interest. Go on.
But that’s what I realized: the people who think Trump is the best president we’ve ever had — and the vast majority of those are, I am confident, the Fuck the Liberals wing of the Republican party — really don’t think he did anything wrong because they think getting Trump reelected is the best thing for the country, and so whatever Trump does to achieve that is actually a good thing. Even if it’s shady. Even if it causes some conflict with Ukraine — the Ukrainians (anyone, really) don’t matter as much as America does, and America is better off with Trump in office, these folks say. So that’s why there was no crime, no impeachable offense: he was doing the right thing.
Of course.
(A couple of quick things while we’re on the subject: the accusations keep getting thrown around that this is a partisan impeachment. Of course it is: all impeachments are partisan. But in the Democrats’ case, while they may be biased against conservatives, it’s not because they belong to the Democratic party, it’s because they disagree with the ideas. So even if the parties were reversed — like, say, the Republicans being the party if Lincoln and the Democrats being the party of the segregationist South — the ideas would still clash and they’d still disagree, and the process of impeachment would be partisan no matter what parties there were, or how many. The parties reflect our divides, they don’t create them. Though I wonder if that is still true of the GOP under Trump. And also, it keeps being said, in various ways by both sides, that this process will ruin impeachment, ruin Congress, ruin the country. Of course it won’t. If people with integrity and good intentions get into office, things will improve; if corrupt cowards get into office, everything will go badly. The question is if this process will lead to more corrupt cowards being elected, and at the moment, I’d say: of course.)
So, now we won’t have witnesses or evidence, and Trump will be acquitted and will go back on tour leading up to his reelection bid. And about 50 million people will vote for him because A) he’s not a socialist; B) he put in place those nice white Jesus-lovin’ Justices who will end abortion for us all, and C) fuck the liberals. And I truly hope, and I mostly believe (as cynical as I am, I still believe) that a large number of key voters, moderates and swing voters and those who really hated Hillary Clinton so much they voted for Trump instead of her, will vote for someone who didn’t abuse their power and who isn’t a spurting fountain of corruption. I think a lot of smart people voted for Trump in 2016, and a lot of them realize it didn’t work out the way they wanted it to. I believe that a lot of them will vote him out of office, at least partly because he abused his power and the Congress failed to act on it, failed to do their jobs as Trump has failed to do his job. I hope that they will also vote out the Republican majority in the Senate, because they abdicated their responsibility and betrayed the country.
I don’t know if it will happen that way. I hope so.
But I know this: if he does get reelected, I’m going to look into emigrating to some other country, somewhere that doesn’t reelect a corrupt narcissist because the other political party makes them mad. It’s bad enough that the politicians choose party over country, but they’re cowards who want to keep their jobs more than they want to do their jobs (And yes, that goes for both sides; Dianne Feinstein fucked up the Kavanaugh hearings because she played it for maximum political damage to Trump, and so we got that shitstick on the court for the next thirty years.), but when my countrymen do that? Fuck them. I’m out. And yes, that means they win, and they will gleefully cheer as I leave. And I sincerely hope that my fellow liberals will all come with me, and leave this broken, failing country in their hands, so they can turn it into Gilead and start picking out their Handmaids. I wish them as much joy of what’s left of America as they wished me when they voted Trump into office expressly to fuck with me.
That is: none. Of course. Choke on the ashes of what you’ve wrought, you GOP bastards. Follow your Perfect Leader into hell. I’m done with all of this.
To be perfectly clear: I will fight with everything I’ve got for the next nine months. But if they win again, presidency and congress, that’s my last straw. This is my Waterloo.
Just Dusty 
