On Saturday, September 7, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump predicted that his plan to deport 15 to 20 million people currently living in the United States would be “bloody.” He also promised to prosecute his political opponents, including, he wrote, lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters, and election officials.
On MSNBC Today, in the 'Joy Reid Show', Joy pointed-out that both Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel are Immigrants from Countries without a Deep Democratic Tradition... Neither believes in Democratic Discourse, but rather in a $$$ defined Autocracy... They both believe that they have SuperHuman Intelligence... I suspect that in the Event of a DJT Victory, they expect 'Multiples' on their $$$ Investments in a DJT/Vance Victory...
Both of them are products of Apartheid South Africa, which is why they are fascists and racists. I'd be fine with cancelling their citizenship papers and deporting them.
TC, I was living in the Cape and not yet 9 years old in June 1948 when Malan and his Herstigte Nasionale Party came to power. I left South Africa with my parents over a year later.
I have often wondered what would have become of me if I had grown up there. The more so as my love of the land went deep -- it took me six years to accept that I would not be returning.
Simple. Either acceptance of the conditioning a white kid could expect there, even if his parents and schooling were unconnected with Afrikaner nationalism; or jail... or worse.
Even at age 8, I was thinking for myself, questioning, questioning, but skeptical about many of the answers I was receiving from adults. The most important teaching I had received from my mother, and even if I found it hard to understand the religious aspect of what she told, I took the message to heart:
We are all the children of the one God, so we human beings are all brothers and sisters; regardless of our differences, we are family, and so we must behave towards one another as brothers and sisters. The worst crime possible is to harm or kill others because they look different or have different beliefs.
My mother called this "the crime against God".
I know now what caused her to say these things to me in a darkened room. My parents had just received from my Dad's first cousin, a senior officer in the British medical corps who opened two Nazi concentration camps in 1945, documents and photographs of the second camp: Bergen-Belsen.
Given this message, my skepticism and my feelings about what I saw all around me, I came away deeply opposed to what I saw as the petty tyranny of Apartheid, and the conviction of all humans' deep underlying equality has stayed with me ever since.
I'm not sure that Apartheid conditioning is responsible for Thiel's and Musk's belief in their own superiority, but the combination of intellectual and material wealth makes for the most potent of delusions. These men are titans who take themselves for gods.
ADDENDUM: Christ's warnings about the inherent dangers of wealth apply to ALL acquisitions that are less than essential. These include intellectual wealth, social status and all forms of power in this world, including spiritual power. The problem is not with wealth in itself but with its effect upon us, how we relate to it, for attachment to all the things "added unto" us can so gum us up that we're no longer free to become what we really are. Things, money, status, power come to possess us, not we them...
Uneducated white men are the bulk of Trump's supporters. They believe Trump, Musk, Thiel and the other billionaires who blast their Fascism uninterrupted throughout much of the media.
CNN, the Washington Post and even The NY Times are beginning to report on Trump's mental instability and his Fascist comments, but is it too late to affect the election?
Gary, I thought all the white guys sitting behind death star in Latrobe thought his remarks about Palmer were funny as they all had locker room talk grins. So many have his same views about the world and that include female MAGAs as well. Peter reminds us too of why these people have no idea of what Jesus taught. I have reported here that quote of the week, maybe year, from a MAGA. "Jesus is wrong". The need for carte blanche (provided by death star) for expressing hatred is truly strong.
I give these media no credit. I feel they are reacting to reader blow back, plus the level of ugly crazy getting so high they simply have been embarrassed (not shamed) into reporting, along with a soupcon of hedging bets although that's an uneven game since one side will extract retribution for criticism if they win and the other won't.
DJT's Minions can Receive Information, but are they capable of assimilating it, and changing their Minds? I am Skeptical... I would Venture that they 'Feel', not 'Reason' thru Life... They 'Follow' rather then Question...
The Melting Pumpkin says.."I like the uneducated"...and does the "accordian hands rapist" routine.....Heritage 2025 Cult plans want to eliminate the Department of Education..
The set up for dictataorship is up front and centre.
Yes. It's too late. Brainwashed humans simply cannot mentally any process information that doesn't match their programming. We in the USA promote this conversion of human minds with our liberal definition of free speech and the invention of technology that makes speech with negligible cost. Then we add a a legal system that is unsuited for modern life due to it's archaic "due process".
The stones hanging around our necks chokes our breath and then breaks our backs.
And these pompous media "giants"? The high windows are waiting. Their one dollar sales pitches will soon be gone.
I find difficult to find reliable numbers, but most likely a small plurality of white women voted for Trump. Pretty close to an even split compared to the proportion of white men who voted for Trump, but enough white women voted for him that they don't get to be absolved of responsibility.
Jennifer, so did I. We could not go to South Africa during the summer break while we were in the Peace Corps because of apartheid. We went to Egypt instead and were actually at that time able to go into Tut's tomb. Much later we won a trip to South Africa from all classical radio in Portland. We saw lots of black people living in poverty still and I thought the white South Africans were lucky to have Nelson Mandela as the first president after apartheid ceased to be official policy. We went past a large multistoried building where people had been put into various racial categories.
Peter: What differentiates Musk and Thiel from Mark Cuban? Cuban's background is not South African but Romanian Jewish and Lithuanian, but the wealth is there. I think Heather's article that includes the description by Dorothy Thompson about the characteristics of those who turn Nazi hits the nail on the head. However, the issue is that you can't prevent people from having those characteristics unless there is a long-term plan to revamp the educational system to include critical thinking skills and civics info. I am just hoping the election will turn out positively.
I think what you wrote may have the answer. Cuban's background is Lithuanian, Romanian (talk about Ceausescu being a deterrent to being fascist!), and Jewish. His wonder Cost Plus company is (literally) saving my daughter close to $4,200 for one of her medications! God bless Mark Cuban!
I believe & think that your analysis & prescription for mitigating the vast numbers of people likely to “turn Nazi” is spot on.
Alas, the extreme right wing (God Bless them, for aren’t they our wayward brothers & sisters?)MAGA-Nazis are too thin-skinned to allow “critical thinking & civics info” to pierce the grievance filled racist bubbles in which they live, and their psyches dwell, fester, and mutate.
They don’t want their kids to learn civics info and critical thinking skills that will set them free, and alienate their kids from their cherished White Supremacist & unapologetic cultural traditions.
If a miracle were to happen and thereby standardize “critical thinking skills & civics,” the Nazi incubator parents would homeschool their kids or find/found a parochial school.
“The issue is that you can't prevent people from having those characteristics unless there is a long-term plan to revamp the educational system to include critical thinking skills and civics info.”
Yes. Although perhaps rather than writing "spiritual power", would a better way to express it be "religious power"? Jesus certainly had spiritual power, as does H.H. the Dalai Lama, as did Mahatma Gandhi, and countless other great spiritual leaders past and present, women and men.
kdsherpa, I do see what you're getting at but, first, distinctions between the two aren't always obvious and, more to the point, what could be more grave than the abuse of spiritual power?
This does happen, as with all forms of power.
Maybe, Saying no. 44 in the Gospel of Thomas addresses this.
Jesus said:
"Whoever blasphemes against the Father will be forgiven, and whoever blasphemes against the Son will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven either on earth or in heaven."
Hi Peter, knowing you originated in South Africa, I’ll tell you a story. Before I settled in Florence, Italy in 1977, while traveling on my student Euro pass one hot day as many passengers often stood by opened windows on the trains fro catch a breeze, I began chatting with a man standing next to me. By his accent, I knew he was from South Africa. We were just shooting the breeze when he asked me why not move to South Africa. I asked him why and he to,d me the labor was cheap. After a brief pause, I quietly returned to my seat without answering him and reflected on his natural racism.
After spending days in a pensioni in Florence having gotten the lay of the land and I knew where the cheap places to eat were, I invited two dorm mates out to the university of Florence cafeteria dinner being about 40 cents American. One boy was Dutch and the other Rhodesian. When we took our trays, it was crowded and no tables were available. I saw one in the distance with a Nigerian boy eating by himself and walked over and asked him if we could join him. Yes he said I I sat down, the Dutch boy sat down but when the Rhodesian neared he paused, looked around and suggest we sit at another table already occupied. I resisted but he went over to another table. I k ew what was happening. I never knew if the Nigerian picked up on it but after a short few minutes, the African boy finished eating and left and at that moment, the Rhodesian came over to sit down. I immediately told him he wasn’t welcomed at our table. The Dutch boy asked to forgive but I refused and told him he had insulted my hosting them. The next morning I arose early to pee and I noticed the bunk bed where the Rhodesian boy slept was carefully made up and he left.
I recall feeling sad that day because I had this notion that us young generation were going to resist the biases of the older generation and the reality was that it wasn’t going to happen. At least it didn’t for me that day. And I wondered if that Rhodesian boy finally learned right from wrong all these years later.
I could tell you quite a few, but no, I wasn't born in South Africa, I spent three years there with my parents -- Dad, a naval officer -- as a kid, from late 1946 to late 1949. Those years marked my life.
I find myself agreeing with much of what you say, but I'm not sure what you mean by intellectual wealth. If you mean gifted with intelligence, then while Musk for instance seems perhaps average or a bit above average (which is pretty low apparently), he has not achieved his wealth by powering himself up there through sheer intellectual ability. He began with advantages of funding and blew past obstacles others might have been slowed down by like laws and morals and ethics while amassing to himself wealth which eventually itself begat wealth. Just looking at Xitter, one sees that past a certain point of wealth one no longer needs to be smart or choose wisely because the margin for error and stupidity is just so large.
If by intellectual wealth you mean access to formal education and the real absorption of education's gifts, or a wealth of high quality information through informal channels, then I would propose that it is a dearth of these types of personal wealth that produces petty men with petty (yet grandiose) goals of power.
If you mean these guys were sent to the best schools to acquire the mechanical tools for gathering wealth while skipping classes that might have enriched their spirits and given them a broader education, then okay... I think I'd call that access to opportunities others are restricted from accessing. I'd have to think hard to come up with a succinct way of saying that phrase. Entitlement comes close but isn't specific enough.
I'd like to come back to you on this, but it is very late here in Europe and I'm tired.
Maybe "intellectual wealth" is not an ideal term for what I'm referring to, but isn't it obvious that there is something vain and beside the point about the accumulation of knowledge for its own sake, especially when no wisdom accrues to the inveterate collector? Typically, some people accumulate knowledge as a means to power. Again, power for its own sake, at best to free oneself so that one can do whatever one likes without let or hindrance. At worst, to manipulate others.
Because of the information work I did as a young man, I developed a magpie's instincts. But... did I, do I really need to carry so much junk around with me?
The main point is surely to avoid accumulating what is not useful to anyone and, rather, to accumulate only what will help free oneself of conditioning and make for inner freedom.
Plainly, there's nothing wrong with being knowledgeable, nothing wrong with expertise, but the current popular rejection of experts is not entirely a matter of violent ignorance on the part of those who rubbish them, it is also -- more important -- a response to those who shut themselves up in ivory towers and allow their professional mask to take over from their human face.
It's not so much what we do as how we relate to our actions and whether they free us to find our true selves or simply feed bad habits.
Usually, I feel happy when one or two people for whom I have special respect express a liking for something I have written, or add a perceptive comment of their own.
I want to say I am rather surprised, and most gratified, that something like the considerations in this Addendum, which may seem abstruse to people today, should apparently touch quite a few members of this community, where we are concerned primarily with current events in historical context.
But is this not a time that compels us all to get back down to basics?
As some one who “loves” South Africa I want to comment. How could I not “love” South Africa ? Posh resorts, magnificent animals, fantastic scenery, great food and wine ! Rolling and scheduled power outages, crumbling townships and infrastructure and the malaise of a Mandelian promise gone frighteningly wrong. I had a high school friend who met and married a South African Boer she met at UCLA in the 60s. She was an orphan and we all paid for her 6 week tramp steamer sea voyage to Durban so she could meet his family and get married. She went on to have 6 children and a very interesting life- sending the amah out to search the yard for poisonous snakes before the children went out, being robbed one New Years Eve while in Formal dress by a gang in their driveway, and being widowed in a foreign land. My husband and I were in the wine country and met her youngest son who was a student at the University in Stellenbosch for a drink. It was chilling. He was a very handsome, half American ………. nazi. Our friend was still alive but very ill so I could never ask her” how” ? I have been alive and have seen it all - the great promises and the thudding reality. Maybe, one more time, I can live in a time of great promise.
Seems to me that I find a steady correlation between some god lovers who handily interpret their supposed love for the supreme aspect of it that they translate into being one on earth i.e. if Jesus could be half god why not them?
And then be godlike because of their dominance with money.
The problem's with people's acquired IDEA of God, which they confuse with the object of their belief. Only, the very idea of God as an object of anything or anyone makes no sense. Some may, of course, take your last two phrases literally -- which I've just said in another way. Delusion.
I don't call myself "Christian", yet I take exception to the very idea of "half god", both in general and in relation to Christ. Having flesh, blood and a human form doesn't make one half anything. It is we who make ourselves into caricatures of what we are.
This is no place in which to develop discussion of man's limitless greed, for which, as Seneca remarked, all Nature is too small. But it may be useful to challenge the shards of an idea that some like to present as "Great"; too often the ultimate pretext for crime.
As a little girl, we used to sing this song each week in Sunday School: "God is Love, God is Love". Ever since then, that is how I have perceived "God". (Although prior to that, at age 3 and learning to read, I ran to my mother shouting excitedly, "Mommy! I know who God is!!" "Who?" she asked. "God is a dog!! G-O-D, D-O-G!" She was not impressed. Having said that, I sometimes wonder...
"the combination of intellectual and material wealth makes for the most potent of delusions." Wow. Thank you for that truth, Peter. Your words ring of so much authenticity. I had a similar, though less intensely consequential journey in losing my (Catholic) religion. And at the time, I knew nothing of their covering up of crimes against children.
Hiro, she was Jewish, not Christian. She was a good and wise woman who practiced love and kindness and avoided harmful actions, and what else is religion if not that? For my part, I am not formally Christian, but revere Christ.
Barbara, Bill Adair, founder, or one of them, of Politifact, has a new book, "Beyond the Big Lie", which I'm currently reading. He talks about Murdock, how he bought up the Aussie papers, then the tabloid press in the UK and we know what he did here. According to an examination by the Times, "his influence has given him influence over world affairs, in a way few private citizens have ever had" I'll say!
Yeah, another rich guy know-it-all. Didn’t the UK give him a drubbing some years back over some of his tabloid “news” tactics? Like TFFFG & Elon, if he didn’t have lots & lots of money, he’d be selling timeshares in Boca Roton.
Musk has made himself virtually indispensable to NASA and the Pentagon with Space X and Starlink. We simply have no viable alternatives. He’s actually a Canadian citizen who apparently prefers our tax structure and hopes to “improve” it further with Trump’s election.
Agreed. We haven't even begun to fully explore what is at the bottom of the sea. The expense of space exploration is hard to justify when so many issues need to be addressed on terra firma.
Defund NASA and shift the money to alternate sources of sustainable energy. With enough money, geothermal and fusion can help us with the self-inflicted Climate Catastrophe.
And why is "Starlink" a private company when millions rely on it for all manner of communications including defense and national security?
Tesla - well, I know people who back in the day would never buy a Ford because Henry Ford was an antisemite fascist....
Ah, I seem to agree with you 99.9% of the time, but I do support our funding NASA. We have, in fact, privatized too much of our space presence and thus we get Starlink which has put too much power in Musk's hands. Look at what he (did or didn't) do over the Black Sea. Toss aside whether he did or didn't - consider how trustworthy he would be if Putin were ever to request data from satellites over the US or were ever to threaten the next European nation. Could we be sure we'd be favored in any cold or hot conflict? We need to direct some funding to get more of our own communication satellites up there.
I take comfort from the fact that Luddites have been trying to quash spaceflight and other technologies since the 1960s. In the first place, freeing up that money would in no way guarantee its wise use elsewhere, and in the second place, the work of those building technologies for space exploration has delivered enormous benefits in medicine, communications, and weather forecasting.
I knew someone would say that. OK - "freeing up that money would in no way guarantee its wise use elsewhere, " maybe not, but if the guy using the money is a threat to America, why give it to HIM? Use it wisely OR unwisely on something that isn't.
And if "the work of those building technologies for space exploration has delivered enormous benefits in medicine, communications, and weather forecasting." how much of the sum total of the cost of building those technologies went on just the space side? Do you think if there had been no space side, and the money had been available for alternative research, that the "enormous benefits in medicine, communications, and weather forecasting." wouldn't have been found? After every war people remark on the enormous beneficial discoveries in medicine etc - but the war still costs an unnecessary fortune. And it all comes out of the taxpayers pocket.
Being the richest man in the world is not enough. Maybe we should rethink our priorities. Do we really have to suck up to evil, now that he has removed his mask. This applies to more than Elon.
Thank you for saying that. I would think that the Telsa is doomed since most climate change-minded people, ie, democrats would be his market not republicans. Written with a prayer.
I agree, Linda, especially since he interfered with Ukraine's communication system on at least one occasion. Like many oligarchs, he seems to aspire to power, including that of other nations' dictators.
I agree. That was when I first noticed what a right wing danger he was. Then he started supporting Putin's goals as a means to ending the war. Traitor, traitor, traitor.
I disagree. According to Matt Stoller of the Substack Big, one of the reasons planes are falling apart is because of outsourcing of maintenance, another is that they no longer have engineers in their management. Maybe 1 or 2 still.
So, no engineering considerations in their decision making. Also, tendency to shut them up if their pointing out problems costs money.
You can search through his articles on Boeing if you like. Here are some.
When it comes to national security, outsourcing so much to people like Musk, who is a fascist, is a big problem and other than forcing him to sell it to some other fascist oligarch I see no other way around his ownership of these and access to highly sensitive information I would not share with my high schooler, let alone anyone else whose frontal cortex is not fully developed, usually between 24-30.
Boeing was run from the beginning by engineers. Boeing was moved out of Seattle, into Chicago by the financial people who were getting out of the constant oversight of retired Boeing engineers, that ruined the company.
In 1950, Truman nationalized railroads, in anticipation of a strike that he said would reduce America's ability to maintain it's security, in particular with the impeding Korean War looming into full out conflict. Truman used the army to keep the railroads running. I'm not saying the situation is the same with Musk and his control over vital space access machinery, don't know about Thiel other than he's Vance's puppet master, but the incident illustrates the fact that thinking out of the box and standing up to bullies who endanger the security of our nation shouldn't be tolerated and there are things we can do as a nation, with a good leader (like Kamala Harris) to see the truth and do the right thing for the good of the country.
Truman didnt nationalize the railroads, he just put the military in temporary control of their operations. In a year or so the unions and the companies settled under terms put down by Truman.
I can only Hope that Kamala can stand up to the big boys. Her history as a prosecutor gives credibility, but God, what a list of greedy guys she's up against.
Very true. Boeing Aircraft has become a second rate company unfortunately. It needs to be run by engineers not super high paid bonus administrators who probably don’t work inside the very plants that manufacture planes and rockets.
i think his Canadian side was a relatively brief passage, before emigrating to the US. He sounds like an Ayn Rand enthusiast. Eg Greenspan. Many others, I'm sure, and male.
Diane, probably the war on the regulatory state is also more attractive here. Not to mention the corruption of sufficient numbers of elected representatives who can be bought and lobbied by those oligarchs.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt began a series of informal radio chats to the American public during a turbulent time in the 1930s. The radio back then was to communicating as Twitter is today. Here is an excerpt:
“My fellow Americans, it is whispered by some that only by abandoning our freedom, our ideals, our way of life, can we rebuild our defenses adequately, can we match the strength of the aggressors. …I do not share these fears.”
Trump demands a quaint, televised, fireside chat to compete with FDR. Here is a sneak preview:
“My friends, Hillary Clinton will never see the inside of the White House again as long as I live.
“You people love me so much that I know you want to keep me as your president for life. The Constitution now allows this extended appointment of the executive branch. Our blessed homeland needs me to lead it. I have authorized The Enabling Act, borrowed from German Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s proposal to restrict powers of the Reichstag in 1933. His SS troops made legislators give up their civil liberties and transfer state powers to the Reich government. I’m pleased to tell you that the Democrats will sign away their legislative powers while my ICE agents surround the House of Representatives. I have the power to dissolve Congress and allow my Cabinet to pass much needed laws to Make America Great Again. And I pledge to you that all fake impeachment activity to convict me has ended.
“I also pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country. And we will remove all undocumented immigrants that are poisoning the blood of our country. And we will remove the portrait of African-born Barack Hussein Obama from the White House wall.
“My first act tomorrow will be to have House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Shiftless Adam Schiff picked up for questioning to ascertain their patriotism for the United States.
“I know I’ve been accused of a quid pro quo with Ukraine. There is nothing wrong with finding the truth about liars and cheats like Slow Joe Biden. And there’s nothing wrong asking a nation to help with uncovering wrongdoing by a corrupt man. As your President for Life, I will always tell you the truth. When I make a promise to you, I keep it.
“This concludes the first of my fireside chats. I can’t wait to tell you what I have in store for other scum Trump haters.”
(I don't dispute anything of what Heather has written. Nor the quotes from Dorothy Thompson. What I do find myself apparently in conflict here with other opinions is how we got to this place and time. I tend on the contrarian and I sense the divisions in our society, the blame game mixed with the sins of our past, The iconic Supreme Court 2010 decision Citizens United opening up unlimited corporate campaign financing where "We, the People' are no longer competitive, the corrupting influencer on all who partake of this poison wine, and now we have AI distorting reality. There is now a difficult path ahead to extend American Democracy as we have known it. Only the Good Witches of the North can save us now.)
Bill, I agree with you about Citizens United. Obama warned us about the dangers of unlimited cash. It's hard to believe that Margaret Chase Smith attempted to run for the Presidency offering to accept no donations from anyone-- corporate or private.
Sadly, it can't be done on almost every level of government.
But another loud influential voice we tend to overlook are the myriad lobbyists supported by the well heeled corporations and the ultra wealthy.
Gary, I think the oligarchy has decided to replace civil service workers with lobbyists. By cutting the regulatory departments to the point that they can no longer do their jobs, the administrative state now relies on self-policing by corporations (like Boeing) to assure safety.
And since the expertise of federal employees is being sidelined by Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, legislators are free to rely on lobbyists to write the rules governing their own business practices.
The courts have also been complicit and/or overwhelmed by sophisticated lobbying. Anti-monopoly laws were no longer even taught in law schools and Biden’s resurrection of intervening in monopolies is no doubt one reason the corporate money is flooding into the campaign of the Former Grifter-in-Chief.
I despair that the rebuilding of healthy, honest checks and balances is even possible unless the GOP is strangled and new laws, new enforcement mechanisms and new staffing are implemented. Not sure even the democrats are willing to bite the corporate hands that fund them.
I remember when dems self-policed dems over any Trump/Hitler comparisons. Yet here we are. We let our fear of appearing alarmist, manipulative, and partial hobble the ability to stop this nightmare before it became inevitable.
The Wizard of Oz said North only, lol. My favorite all time movie. If I could die watching a movie, it would be that movie. We waiting every season for the movie to be shown on TV.
There is nothing quaint about Trump. He is growing nastier and nastier in his desperation to get the ugly people out to the polls. He gets help from his Russian Bots, and the MAGAs in office. Andra Watkins spoke to Democrats Abroad about Christian Nationalists, and since Trump is apparently planning on implementing their document for government Project 2025, and turning us into a Christian Nationalist Theocracy, we need to make sure he does not get in by each of us doing our part.
TC, the irony is that its UnAmerican to expel UnAmericans, right? We used to trust our neighbors to ostracize them, render them ineffective
Money has bought the propaganda that has infected their thinking. Money has bought a Court that advocates the destruction of individual rights Money in such Smaug-like hoarding that spending a pittance of it means nothing
The Dragon is awake and circling above
The vote is our last and only sword. There is no Frodo
It’s more like paradoxical than ironic. Related to the intolerance paradox. Intolerance, if tolerated, will eliminate tolerance, so a civilized society must not tolerate intolerance. Too bad, in a way, but there is no other solution.
WoW both of them ?!!! I’ve understood that somehow it’s « not quite possible to expel them from our (country, planet, society… pick one) because of their $$$….
Just in case you're not joking, the planet has become quite small with all the technology we have and more to come. We have to figure out other ways of banning them.
Agreed. They are part of the “enemy withjn” that we could put out with the trash. I’m not a fan of deportation on any level, but if those naturalized folks are undermining democracy, their traitorous actions deserve nothing less than expulsion.
Hi Marge! For the record-I agree with you 100%. That being said, if a legitimate threat is posed by people against our Constitution and democracy, against the very foundation of our United States, there needs to be some accountability for unAmerican activities. Maybe expulsion is the wrong answer-it probably is-but what recourse is available? Domestic terrorists, and I believe Thiel, musk, Murdock and others fall into that category, must not be allowed to continue their rampage of hatred, intentional misinformation, and attempts to murder democracy. Prosecution? Incarceration? How do we deal with them in order to preserve this precious institution?
Yesterday I happened to watch an episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver from 10 months ago. It is all about Elon Musk. This is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eo3zORUGCbM
I purchased my first Tesla in 2014 and upgraded in 2018. I love my Tesla, but in the last few years have wondered what happened to Musk. My son-in-law sold his Tesla and all his Tesla stock because of who Musk has become. To date I am remiss to sell mine, and I have been confused and wondering what happened to him, that is until I watched Oliver's show. Now I realize why he is pouring money into the Trump/Vance campaign. He wants to be able to do what he wants, buy who and what he wants, control who and what he wants, without our government's intervention in any way. And he will spend billions to accomplish that. He and Theil will control Vance and run our country however they want. I think if Trump wins Republicans will immediately invoke the 25th amendment, and put Vance in power which will allow M & T to control an awful lot from behind the scenes. Please tell me I'm wrong about this.
I confess to the same thought, TC. But then I might be part of the problem. I would contribute to Trump's deranged expulsion of all foreign-born citizens. The task, which will require an FDR-type leader, is to reign in the extreme profiteering by a few in the oil and tech businesses...the oligarchs. At a minimum, Musk must be removed from the government-X partnership. That is where the danger lies.
Peter Thiel is from Germany, and moved to the US, but his family spent time in South Africa too, so he has absorbed his ugly ideas in more than one place. Apartheid.
I don't know very much about the government at the time, but I think it was a toxic environment that was rife with cruelty, prejudice, injustice, and violence perpetrated by white settlers, the term Boers or Afrikaners was used. I did not know that about Musk and Thiel. Thank you.
While Peter Thiel is from Germany and came as a child with his parents, I would not say that Germany has a "deep democratic tradition." Germany first had democracy for 15 years during the Weimar Republic leading from the end of WWI to 1933 when the Nazis took over. Then, in 1945 began another period of democracy for part of Germany but the other part was in an authoritarian state until 1990. So, from 1990 until now. That is not such a long time. In fact, there are many people living who have lived under an authoritarian regime, and some still who lived under 2. While Peter grew up in the US after his family immigrated, that is his family's background. Elon Musk comes from South Africa, the land of Apartheid. I don't consider it to have a long tradition of democracy either. Both of them come from countries with strong White Supremacist non-egalitarian societies and both are White Supremacists by their actions, beliefs and rhetoric. We might say it is in their DNA.
Elon Musk is not a great person. He is emotionally and socially immature like a lot of the GenZ men that Trump is trying to reach, and the Millennial men. Good luck with the latter group. All of the millennial men I worked with did not read books, were over focused on YouTube, making money, raising their children and did not vote. Their wives vote though. Given how immature these men were, perhaps that is a good thing. I spent years trying to get one of them to vote. To no avail. Basically he did not feel that the good quality of his life or that which he intends to provide for his young children will be affected either way, so why get off his routine to go out and vote.
I guess. I’m far removed from trends which is why I sometimes rub people here the wrong way. I’m a traditionalist and I feel comfortable in that skin. TV? It comes on for the 6-8 news programs maybe Frontline sometimes. No cable. Reading? I’ve been slacking but I need to start reading again my literary mentor, Mark Twain, who I have a great affinity for. I was recently almost kicked out of a Methodist church open mic for bringing my book to read a passage instead of singing my songs. The short story I recited was titled “My Cat Babe and Donald Trump Have Something in Common” and the story revolved around keeping my cat Babe from licking the oil in the frying pan least he splat diarrhea all over my house like Donald Trump did crap on the nation while in office . OMG, you should have seen what happened next. One woman stood up and tried to shout me down but I pointed out that I had two more sentences to recite and proceeded to finish how it was important to prevent Trump from gaining the White House. I felt the spirit of Mark Twain within as I walked off the stage. I got a big applause. Even sold a book and I had prepared to give them a partial donation to the good church cause but I recinded that offer. They almost banned me but they didn’t. I guess it was their generous Christian side that restrained them, lol.
It does factor in,’how one is raised’ whether it’s the county/country/parent/peer groups. All influences meld and mold one.
There is without doubt too many factors -negative too as people who are ‘unhappy’ stir inwardly seeking peace, love, comfort for sure.
With the hoards of money available seems we could be a lot better off as a whole. But…
I heard another oligarch fell out a window today, and few believe it was ‘a suicide’, catching on in Russia perhaps …
How many read this marvelous HCR ‘Letter’? How many can read? Germany didn’t heed the warning, nor few of the other countries who have been ‘taken’ down that road.
I do know I will disappear if Trump wins…perhaps to start another underground RailRoad if time permits ..a definite issue..I’ve fought for the underdog since I was old enough to care…as have the many here. They called us ‘hippies’ but I was bit older. Back-to-the-landers fit too. The Silent Generation , AF Dad killed just at the end of the ‘war’. Baby Boomers. Some are now Ex-Pats, my first trip abroad opened my eyes how the Americas see themselves. Trump wasn’t the first who brought out the cracks in the system. It still needs a lot of work.
This election is pivotal. As well as ‘26 & ‘28…and and and..Blue is the hue and expect of them more carefully, my sisters and brothers…
I disagree with your reading. The German Federal Republic is 75 years’ old and after the fall of the wall, it absorbed the much smaller GDR. There has been tensions with the old East German areas for many reasons- mostly cultural and economic- but the majority of the country has been democratic since Adenauer , who had been a democratic politician during the Weimar Republic, became its first post-war Chancellor. More importantly, Germans are culturally attached to democracy and human rights - and far more than many Americans.
I am a member of Democrats Abroad in Germany, which is a very democratic American group. I am also a Brown-skinned dual German and American citizen currently living in Germany. I am surrounded by Germans who are not fully democratic in my mind, nor are they that historically aware of their privilege and who paid for it. At the same time I know Germans who are very Democratic. Many of them have lived in the US and taken on US citizenship as well.
I see commitment to Democracy in both countries, and those who are fascist. There are those who are being manipulated by Russian and other Bots, leading their on a string to think in certain ways. Both governments need to make better legislation to protect us from the manipulation on line.
Regardless if it's in their DNA, they belong in this country. We're a country that believes in Democracy and a democratic system and the rule of law. Let them go to Russia and be on Putin's cabinet.
Nazis got a bad reputation in the wake of WWII, but it seems like Republicans have canonized $$$ defined Autocracy (and aristocracy) since at least Reagan, not quite as blatantly as in the present.
Besides being Horrible Ciminals, and Insane, the Nazis lost thankfully... If DJT, and his Minions Win Power, and stay in Power... Guess how the $$$ Aristocracy will define themselves? OBW: Reagan was a B-List Actor who, once Elected, thought He & Nancy were Aristocracy...
First of all, the Nazis did not lose, they were defeated by the efforts of allied opponents.
Leonard Leo, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts Jr. Samuel Alito Jr., Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett were all raised Catholic. Which would have hobbled their rise (as would've being Black, female, and of Italian and Irish heritage) were it not for the liberalization of American society and US law achieved by progressive activists. The liberalization they are hell bent on rolling back, the civil rights laws they are turning the Constitution on its head to overturn, and the progressives they have immunized demagogue and would be dictator Donald Trump to officially persecute. Would they turn Nazi? Ha! Their Black robes barely hide their white sheets and brown shirts. While their upbringing may have instilled a taste for absolutism and authoritarianism (antithetical to the Constitution) rather than allegiance to the Golden Rule translated to civil society as "caring for the general welfare" they have a bent for greed and are draining American law of justice in order to obstruct government's ability to administer equitable taxation and reasonable regulation of industry. After the defeat of Hitler, at the Nuremberg, there were special trials for German jurists who had drained German law of justice to legalize Nazi bigotry and establish Nazi rule with its attending atrocities.
But on the front end, when Hitler's coup failed he went legit and won power through the electoral process. A victory achieved in large part by Stalin directing German Communists to split off from the German Center Right. Just as Putin aligned Jill Stein is splitting the American Leftish from the American Center Left as represented by the Democratic Party - in order to elect Trump, institute Project 2025, and establish a corporate ChristoFascist Christian Nationalist state - in which along with her fellow Trump enabler Stephen Miller, as a Jew she would be denied the very rights which have enabled her rise. (Thanks to KKK Grand Wizard and GOP gadfly David Duke's early salesmanship to his base, Putin is the avatar of American White Christian Nationalism. Duke prepared the way for Trump's allegiance to Putin and the Right's promotion of Viktor Orban. Just as American racism against Black persons prepared the way for Hitler's racist theories and atrocities.)
One wonders, as these hypocrites hollow out the foundations of democracy, what makes them think they'll survive the roof caving in?
We at least are allied and our coalition is in the struggle to defeat this American iteration of fascism.
And what is Catholicism if not a patriarchy. They pretend to honor "Mother Mary" when she is just a tool to cover up their admission of women into the power structure of the church.
Compare the number of Saints that are women to men in the Catholic Church. Just try to imagine a female priest or heaven forbid a female Pope.
The changes they would try to make can't even be imagined.
Political campaigns are intrinsically partisan and win/lose. American politics has evolved to be a two party system - that is not intrinsic to our democratic republic, but no other parties have evolved from the ground up to effectively challenge the two parties (showing up once every four years as a spoiler candidate isn't party building.) There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a two party system - while non partisan districting, campaign finance reform, ending the Electoral College, and Ranked Choice Voting would go a long way to improve it.
That said, governing ought not be primarily partisan and win-lose. Legislating should be coming to consensus through reasoned debate of empirical evidence - that is freed of party, religious, and ideological creed. This is possible.
"We at least are allied, and our coalition is in the struggle to defeat this American iteration of fascism." We damn well better be. Just today, Trump called for "the kind of generals that Hitler had." This goes back to his usual Trumpian stand saying that "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" If he loses, and I suspect he will do so, law enforcement, I hope, will have a plan to tamp down in forceful fashion, the traitorous actions of Trump's minions. Assuming Trump loses, the left, alongside the Constitutionally faithful right, should have much to study and question much of the Trump right's posture during these last four years. This may well be a delicate balancing act as one has to decide where freedom of speech ends, and insurrectionist talk and action begin. We can start with Mike Johnson as he tries to explain his honest "disagreements" with Liz Cheney, who didn't buy a dime's worth of his statements.
"... the left, alongside the Constitutionally faithful right, should have much to study and question much of the Trump right's posture during these last four years."
The Trump right's posture during these last four years is the coming to fruition of the Republican posture since the time Ronald Reagan jumped in bed with Ralph Reed - Movement Conservatism with Religious Extremism. And before that the Southern Strategy.
MAGA is the ideological heir and the blood heir of the Confederacy. In his musing on his sentimental journey home, The American Scene, ex-pat Henry James writes of his visit to Richmond, Virginia. It is worth looking up. James is prescient in his observations of a society in denial of historical fact and received ethics. In order to defend the slave scheme, talk of anything and everything else must be banned from the public sphere - from political speech, news media, libraries, schools, the pulpit. In short, James describes the social apparatus of creating 'alternative facts.' Add to the rewriting of history as hagiography (Southern traitors elevated in every town square as Heritage Heroes), the intrusion of faith based irrational habits of mind - and you have a body politic which can be convinced to see Trump "as a good family man with a good heart"
- as I heard one man from Nebraska say on CSpan this morning.
The Nazis were not stupid or insane what they were proficient in their ability to RATIONALIZE. They had science, i.e. eugenics to rationalize iliminating Jews et al.
Go read Jacob Heilbrunn's "America Last: The Right's Century Long Romance With Foreign Dictators." The Republicans have been scum for a long time. Only $18 at Amazon delivered tomorrow.
I want to read this. Unfortunately, it’s not new for some influential people to admire dictators. Some wealthy people admired Hitler and Mussolini, other famous people admired Stalin, and all of them left millions of dead in their wake.
I try to avoid Amazon. I’ll look for it at my local independent bookstore. Yep, it will cost more, but Amazon and Walmart are both on my boycott list (which is very very short! LOL).
The left has its share of foibles on this topic. We all have to remember Biden's love affair with that of Netanyahu and the billions he promotes to rain down on the IDF war machine against Gazans. Although the republicans likely take the cake on this issue, some democrats also have enough blood on their hands.
What has helped Trump rise to power has been the social media, and the tacit cooperation of the legacy press. The legacy press lost its readers to all sorts of siloed media. Murdoch helped spread fascist lies. Now, unless you make an uncomfortable effort, you never know what the other side is thinking. Having a real national dialogue has become impossible. Both sides live in totally separate worlds.
I agree that the rise of fascism was expedited by social media. The spreading of lies to people who were hungry/starving for lies to satisfy their fears and hatred.
Slave owners were autocrats and dictators who established laws to increase and maintain their power. They shaped the Constitution to favor their positions and declared a civil war to maintain their way of life. What Reagan and the Rs have done is not new. Unfortunately tyranny, autocracy, dictatorship are part of America’s legacy.
Note that Musk’s Space X gets much of its funding from NASA and Tesla is dependent on tax credits to its buyers to sell cars. Both of those companies rely on government funding that they supposedly despise!
You can have all the money in the world but you can't buy the majority of the American people in this country who believe in Democracy. With the power of our vote, nothings is impossible.
A student at Stanford, Julie Lythcott-Haims, following a speech he gave to students at that university, told her that apartheid was "economically sound". Any moral issues were irrelevant. The point – a common one made by apologists of the apartheid state at the time – seemed to be that South Africa was much more developed than its neighbours and that life there, even for those who were systematically denied their rights, was better than it was in, say, Ethiopia or Burundi. (From "The Contrarian" by Max Chafkin)
Like the Nazis, the anti-fascists, too, would be from all walks of life. That is the value of the tour, now underway, of joint appearances of former Representative Liz Cheney and Vice President Kamala Harris. ⚖️
Ned, I may be old, but I can still lace up my boots, get out there and make some “good trouble” to resist the erosion of our democracy. Despite its flaws (we CAN & MUST do better for all Americans) I will stand at the ramparts to defend it & encourage its “growth”. ☮️🗽🇺🇸
P.S., Important essay by Joyce Vance; tucked inside it is an arresting and inspiring profile of courage. Such normally unseen displays of principle over preference -- of the means sullying or ennobling the ends -- need more air-time. https://joycevance.substack.com/p/first-amendment-rights-for-everyone
The Harris and Cheney townhall moderated by Charlie Sykes on 10/21/24 in Waukesha, Wisconsin had impressive statements by both of them. Very interesting to hear Liz Cheney discuss anti-abortion laws such as in Texas. Their townhall moderated by Maria Shriver on the same day in Oakland County, Michigan was also impressive:
Both town halls yesterday were good. Fortunately I was working from home editing photos and was able to catch them both in their entirety. I like how they had a Democratic moderator for one event and a Republican moderator for the other.
I watched those town halls also. There were lengthy discussions on National Security. There were also intelligent questions from the audience on important issues. These small events calm me. Volunteering with other Democrats here is also helping to alleviate election anxiety.
One thing that crosses my wretched little my wretched, little mind every time I hear Senator Vance take questions from the crowd -- in apparent contrast to Vice President Harris supposedly avoiding the press -- remains: ¡DAMNATION! Are these questions and reporters planted ¿or what? It seems so rehearsed.
Yes, the fascist movement filters down from the national level to state level to city & county level. It’s composed of people from all levels! It a political plague!
Yesterday, at my early voting site, there was a man in the bed of a truck (with his company’s emblem on the side) with a huge sign that said, save America, vote Trump, blah, blah. He screamed, Took a break, and screamed some more. I said, to nobody in particular, isn’t that against the law. The man in Front of me said, I think so, they are supposed to stay so far away, don’t remember exactly how far. He was ignored. But laws don’t really stop the devoted cretins.
In Ohio, election signs and electioneering are restricted within 100 feet of a polling location, and just about every state has similar restrictions. Musk’s payments and contests in Pennsylvania are in blatant violation of Federal election law, but the SCOTUS majority would look the other way. They want to make corruption and bribery legal again.
No police, no objection. I tried to get his plates to make a complaint. May go back tomorrow to see if he’s still there. The guy in front of me was not impressed. Yea
Trump has proven that the law is not applied equally. Why is he still walking around after being convicted of crimes? Justice delayed is justice denied…and SCOTUS supposedly the highest law makers in the land have clearly demonstrated that applying the law to benefit their benefactors is more important than liberty and justice for all.
Important essay by Joyce Vance; tucked inside it is an arresting and inspiring profile of courage. Such normally unseen displays of principle over preference -- of the means sullying or ennobling the ends -- need more air-time. https://joycevance.substack.com/p/first-amendment-rights-for-everyone
Exactly ! When Dorothy Thompson wrote about anti-fascists being those who have something in them, “be it breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern”, she cast her net wide and she was a keen observer of the anti-fascists of her era. Who could have imagined that Generals de Gaulle and de Hautecombe (aka Leclerc), those pillars of ultra-conservatism, would come to lead the Free French Forces against the Nazis? Liz Cheney is of that mould.
Love the fertile context in which you place this emergent unity to push back fascism, Sophie; thank you. You live up to your name . . . wise. All anti-bodies to this vilely violent virus are created equal but we are not carbon copies of each other.
Mary, precisely!!!!!!!!!!! Indeed chilling. Many on this letter know that it can happen here and will happen here if the monster is elected. He is nothing more than a shill. He is too ignorant/stupid but his fascist backs know that JD is their Hitler.
True - chilling. If we lose and Trump wins, democracy falls. Can we recover it from within? Given the military power held by those in control, probably not. As with Germany, it would require a defeat from outside forces. And, pray tell, where are those forces today? They don't exist. This is why this is the most important election not just here in the U.S., but in the history of the world. I don't feel that this is hyperbole.
Mary, I agree. I’m so glad that Heather shared Thompson’s history. Hopefully, the US public that voted for Trump in the past is now listening to people like Liz Cheney when those Republicans warn about Trump (and JD Vance).
Mary-I was glad to be introduced to Thompson. Our history and the people who fought to help us “perfect our union” reveal so much to us about the courage, love and humanity that has brought us this far against people who as Melanie said “don’t care” about others or our nation.
My thoughts, too, Mary. This newsletter is Heather at her finest: how history has examples of marvelous people who stand up against the maddening crowd and perverse individuals and who give us a compass for our times.
Chilling indeed. The parallels are terrifying... If Trump and Vance win the election, they'll have Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff and Barack Obama dangling from a gallow faster than you can say the word "unconstitutional".
The parallels to the rise of Nazism have repeatedly been drawn in the past few years, most eloquently by HCR tonight; will anyone listen, before it's too late?
I love your concern and commitment but keep in mind that the number of readers here measures in the hundreds of thousands at most and mostly in states that are not swing states. In an electorate of 200 million people it is a pittance. That is why I have been struggling to fight the sentiment here that we should avoid the main stream media. We NEED the mainstream media as a strong ally and ignoring them will not make that a reality. Mark my words.
Agreed. Well stated, Jon. Ms Thompson was a high-profile member of mainstream media. My hope is that members of the mainstream media read Dr Cox Richardson. Would it not be great were the good professor to appear of Colbert or Jimmy Kimmel? That would get her words out there.
P.S., Important essay by Joyce Vance; tucked inside it is an arresting and inspiring profile of courage. Such normally unseen displays of principle over preference -- of the means sullying or ennobling the ends -- need more air-time. https://joycevance.substack.com/p/first-amendment-rights-for-everyone
Sheer nonsense. If you truly believe that you are in a fantasy world. Some of the MSM are not our friends but to say categorically that the entire universe of MSM is authoritarian is just to demonstrate your ignorance.
I don’t think the media outlets as a whole are authoritarian, but they are ignoring things that they shouldn’t for ratings. My biggest problems with them are their ignoring Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior, bloodthirsty statements, the false equivalence between the policies of the parties, and their treating political campaigns as a horse race while ignoring the policy differences and Trump’s dangerous policies.
On this substack we don't generally talk to one another in this manner as you just have. We don't generally call one another ignorant ( even if we briefly think someone's thinking is off for a moment). I truly hope this substack does not become an ugly place in a world of other ugly places. Civil discourse is important and has thrived here.
There are several provocateurs here that come across as harsher than many of the other commenters. There are a handful that I completely ignore, and frequently just scroll past their comments, and one or two that I read. By and large this is a civil group, which is why I like it here.
HCR has a million followers who read her Letters to an American. I first found her on FB in 2020-2021. I later found her on here, where I'd come to read Dan Rather's column.
This evening, Dr Cox Richardson hit a grand-slam. Nazism or its 'American Cousin' today would be an acquired taste. Oh that this brilliant essay were read by 15% of the adult population or by a third of the grown-up women. 🙏
He triggered my fears back with the BS about Obama’s birth. Then I have watched as our institutions have bent and weaved to excuse and rationalize. The SC has given credence to BS on every level that still shocks me to my bones. The election seems anticlimactic in a way. I hope I’m wrong.
he triggered my fears the moment he was putting in Temporary members if Cabinet...didn't require any Senate approval, and when Paul Ryan gave him passes when he violated the Emoluments clause. The writing was on the wall..the GOP want him in as an autocrat ,create an oligarchy, kleptocracy
P.S., Important essay by Joyce Vance; tucked inside it is an arresting and inspiring profile of courage. Such normally unseen displays of principle over preference -- of the means sullying or ennobling the ends -- need more air-time. https://joycevance.substack.com/p/first-amendment-rights-for-everyone
Thanks to Faux News and the rest of the MSM that has fallen into line. Why? Because the media is owned by the wanna be fascists who all see a future Führer Vance. He has been groomed in a very short time and is pure evil.
JustRaven, this “tune” has been blaring loudly for several years now, but methinks for so many folks it has now been relegated to “elevator music” and they no longer pay attention or “hear” it. Makes me mad/sad and increases my resolve to push back. Just last week a friend gave me a “stop project 2025” button as we walked into a restaurant to meet a group for lunch…she said to me “you tried to tell us all about this and warn us over a year ago and we didn’t listen….we are listening now.” I keep banging that drum to whomever will listen….some take the time to do so, others not so much. I don’t want to preach, but do want to inform—lol….reminds me of the last two folks I shared this info with…they were the Watchtower-pamphlet folks who came to my door; I encouraged them to research it at non-partisan sites & not just take my word for it. [I usually have engaging conversations with these folks…it’s always interesting to me, a religious “none”.]
Barbara, I am glad you had success with your friend. The only thing that my retired work cohort says to my warnings about Project 2025 is "He disavowed it; don't worry" which is utter garbage.
Unfortunately I feel that I'm preaching to the choir. The others who end up being MAGA supporters don't listen. They are too entrenched. I've yet to find someone on the fence. Glad you were able to.
Shellee, it’s not that I changed anyone’s mind—they are all pretty center or center-left politically (‘cept one & we don’t discuss politics)—but they just weren’t paying attention….all I did was to encourage them to look into it. Glad the MSM (largely cable news such as MSNBC) is finally starting to cover it & sound the alarm.
G-D bless Ms Liz Cheney, always; G-D be with Vice President Harris, daily. We face a struggle I feared might come -- but wrote off as my neuroticism hard at work -- that may determine whether we persevere or perish. 🤝
Thanks, Ned, got an error message when trying to play the vid, but was able to read the transcript below. Was a lot to take in (tired late night eyes) but was impressed by his “words” (or those of his speechwriter!). Can you imagine TFFFG saying anything, anything at all, remotely as coherent?
P.S., Important essay by Joyce Vance; tucked inside it is an arresting and inspiring profile of courage. Such normally unseen displays of principle over preference -- of the means sullying or ennobling the ends -- need more air-time. https://joycevance.substack.com/p/first-amendment-rights-for-everyone
¿My gut? Vice President Harris wins the popular vote by five-to-seven points with a substantial majority of the Electoral College. ¿Why? Because, I believe, Trumpers are not avoiding polls while many Harris supporters ignore polling requests. ✌🏽
Ned, I too think she will win the popular vote, probably by a wider margin than did HRC or Biden…but, alas, it’s the vote counters & electoral college who might thumb the scale. That is what I worry about.
There's public polling and there's internal private polling and they're quite different. It's the public one that's meant to sway us in whatever direction. I call it the Polling
Industrial Complex. In sociology practice and public polling it's the quality of the questions that makes all the difference. There are open ended questions which are not asked by the public type because they would be too complicated and nuanced to compile quickly. So what is asked are yes no questions and many of them are quite slanted, and also who is actually being polled makes a difference as well.
HCR mentions a polling watcher expert that she actually trusts -
who(?)- anybody(?)
Do not pay attention to the polls. They are meant to make us nervous and fearful.
It's always been in the shadows from the beginning of this country. Democracy is a living thing and it needs to be fed or it will starve and turn on its people.
nd the problem is that democracy has been feeding on big money for a long time. We’ve all seen it. We’ve all experienced it. It is not solely a Republican issue. Everyone in politics is feeding on money and it is disgusting. It’s bringing down our democracy. If we win this election and can hold onto our win, we need immediate guard rails in place that we all thought were there all these years. We need campaign finance reform. We need money out of politics. It is ruining the country to have so much money involved. And I’m looking at you DNC who has been asking me for cash daily in every form that you can send the request multiple times a day.
Dana, you are saying some things that I have been dwelling on. Campaign finance reform has been a major concern of mine for some time. The amount of money being spent on this election is obscene. We could have solved the housing crisis and childhood hunger with that amount of money. I also think campaigns should be shorter like in other countries. Look at how quickly Kamala Harris has gotten her message across. We need to overturn Citizens United but that will take hard work that every voter needs to be aware of when voting for down ballot candidates. Without a blue senate and house progress will be hard won if not impossible.
I'm so frustrated with this. For every message asking for money I block 2 or 3 more show up. Sending money is one of the few things I can do to help the Democrats win, but that money is used to bombard us with ads, which we all hate.
Now the need for money is used to target ads at "low information voters" who are still undecided. I can't believe we're going to be relying on this group to be the deciding votes for if we will be losing our democracy or not. The people who are paying the least attention are holding all the cards?!?
A woman wrote recently that she had studied statistics and that poll workers know exactly how to get the results they want. Sure makes sense since the media is flooded daily with polls and most of us know no one who has been polled.
Thanks for this, as always! It's worth mentioning that when Thompson commented that she was hearing Hitler's words in America, no one (or almost no one) knew that Hitler's words _came from_ the United States, where the language, laws, and concepts of Black slavery were born. As Isabel Wilkerson, among others, has so clearly documented, the Nazis borrowed the racist playbook of the U.S., but they found it too draconian even for them, and modified the "one drop rule" before unleashing it on Germany.
Adolph Hitler started formulating his Theories of Racial Superiority by watching 1920s Westerns... The Indigenous are depicted as Ignorant Savages... I sometimes watch Old John Wayne Movies, and am aghast at the Depictions of the Indigenous... 21st Century Reality? The Indigenous have the highest Participation Rate of any Ethnic Group in the American Military... Notably, 1/4 of the 'Trigger-Pullers', the People-That-Matter, in the Elite SOCOM/JSOC Units are Indigenous...
& Hitler and Nazi lawyer Carl Schmidt sent German lawyers to study at southern law schools. The assignment? Study the legalese of Jim Crow, segregation, racial intimidation.
Ted-the history you’ve mentioned is what Americans need to reckon with-then maybe we can truly make progress toward the ideals of freedom, justice and equality.
I think it needs to be taught in junior high American History. Every culture has myths that it passes down from generation to generation. Our myth is those words, “We the people…” they really meant just wealthy white Protestant men from Northwest European origin. Everyone else was outside the rule of law until 1964.
Chilling indeed! The problem, however, is that those of us in the choir have been singing this song from HCR’s sheet music for quite some time while those who need to hear the message are singing a different, discordant tune.
It Darkly Humors Me That 'Cadet-Bone-Spurs' Revels In Exhorting His Minions To Violence... It seems that DJT's Enthalls his Masses... DJT is a Fake Tough-Guy... He should be Tried, Sentenced, and Imprisoned for Sedition, and Treason....
He should be put in the ring with that American eagle that was on his desk for a photo op some years ago….that should straighten out the “pecking order” properly. 🦅🇺🇸
Kelly, In my view, your comment amplifies the importance these next two weeks for as much conversation as we possibly can muster, be it through phone banking and/or canvassing in battleground states (for residents of safe states, those states closest to home), expressly with right-leaning Independents and “soft” Republicans. I would add I sense Harris’s and Cheney’s three appearances in Wisconsin on Monday to be a great source for talking points.
Barbara – I quite agree. FDR was president when I was born, and I managed to survive Nixon, Reagan, and W. I never thought any of them would look good compared to Trump. And even Trump I seems to pale in comparison to the promises of a possible Trump II. Your advice on actions for the next two weeks is excellent. We all need to crank up our efforts.
Kelly, Thank you for writing. I would note, though not originating with me, every time I hear the phrase “margin of error” I think “margin of effort.” As for a second Trump term, given his intent to instate only loyalists combined with the Court granting him absolute immunity for “official acts,” contrary to his first term, there’d be no guardrails. Hence, with Project 2025 as a guide, we have an opportunity to portray the indescribable forms of agony and anguish that would be unleashed were Trump to be re-elected.
We need to fold into our thinking the fact that Trump is the Trojan horse and Vance is the attack force. Does anyone really think that Trump will even make it to January 6th? He's falling apart folks, mentally and probably physically apart from his fake doctors report. Vance and Thiel and Musk are the biggest bank rollers of anyone who will follow their orders and their direction. We've got to defeat one force after
another. First let's vote Trump out which means Vance too. And vote deep Democrat all the way down the ticket, that's quite obvious.
Kelly, if I could still march, I'd be carrying my sousaphone and playing things like "three blind mice", the "ompa-loopa" theme from "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" or the "Imperial Death March" as they held their rallys. It is hard to defend oneself when wrapped in 37 pounds of brass, and I have to carry off hand, but I'd do it.
“My offense was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man, after all. That is a crime against the reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to save the German people….”
Hitler hardly measured up to the Nazi ideal of a “superior” being. Sadly, it is sometimes the more ordinary looking people who do horrible things against their fellow humans.
Yes, Heather, we have a Nazi in our midst. " “But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son," so to describe Mr. Trump. Mary Trump has been telling us, it is time the major media stand up and listen, otherwise they will be gone. Now is the time to rise up against Mr. Trump.
The problem is, however, that we do not have just one Nazi, but many and all are extremely filthy dirty wealthy people in and around Congress. Our history has shown that America harbored Nazis. My father was already in this country when the gathering at Madisen Square Garden occurred. My mom was en route from London where she took refuge after fleeing Germany. MY maternal grandparents were not so lucky as they perished in 1942 at the gas camp called Chelmno. Neither parent ever discussed the Madisen Square Garden incident with my sister nor I, ever. In my heart of hearts, I honestly believe that Stephen Miller reads Mein Kampf to Trump, out loud. It is Miller who is a Jewish Nazi.
I am so sorry to hear what happened to your maternal grandparents, Marlene. You have long been a voice of human dignity on this blog, and while it may not be my place to say, I suspect your grandparents would be proud of you.
Sadly, yes. During law school, I was a clerk for an assistant AG for the state of Michigan, and he was one of the finest people I have ever known. He came to the U.S. as a boy, and served in the U.S. Army as a translator for American officers interrogating Nazi officials. His own parents were deported and murdered at Chelmno. He never told me that himself, but I learned it from his secretary.
Marlene, you have my utmost sympathy for the loss of your grandparents in such a horrible manner.
There were many "Jewish" Nazis. They were collaborators with Hitler and his minions who willingly helped round up people in the ghettos, helped get them to Auschwitz and Birkenau, and helped herd them into the ovens. At the very end many of them were imprisoned themselves despite their support of the regime and they too were gassed. Hitler had little patience or sympathy for Jews.
I expect the same from Trump, even as he has a Jewish son in law and his daughter converted. Stephen Miller probably should be looking over his shoulder constantly, no matter his support for Trump.
I have a question, Jon. How can these people both "hate the Jews" with every fiber of their being and yet support Israel as they try and destroy Gaza and thereby the Palestinian's? Does it reflect their belief in the "end times"?
Ally, I think they support the Christians there, not necessarily the Jews. However…Israelis have provided Europe with the finest food in the regions. They cannot eat pork but they export high quality meats because they are rich in agriculture. They do raise pigs for slaughter. Science and medicine are foremost in Israel. Many of our meds come from there. Netanyahu is Israel’s Trump. Most Israelis despise him and while the IDF killed Sinwar, the architect of the Hamas invasion, Bibi gets the credit, unfortunately. The extremism in the West Bank is because there are Ultra Orthodox Jews who invaded that area. They are also aligned with Bibi’s Likud Party. They are sickening and much like the MAGATS we are dealing with. Israelis want to live in peace with the Arab nations but the predominately male powers that be, won’t let that happen. The Palestinians deserve their own government and country. They don’t deserve the deviousness of being dominated by those who want to disrupt their lives. No one does.
Bibi Netanyahu is the Jewish Version of a "Christian Nationalist". It is like comparing Marjorie Taylor Greene to Daniel Berrigsn (the Jesuit priest who advocated against the Vietnam War often on the basis of Christian beliefs). Greene demonstrates such an utter lack of understanding of anything that would be considered truly "Christian" just as Netanyahu seems to have no connection anymore to the reasons a Jewish nation even exists (to provide a place for the few millions of European Jews left after the Holocaust).
So the support of Israel from the far right is much less (if at all) in support of "religion" as it is in support of some of the objectives of far right extremism, i.e. the suppression of Islamic countries. I am personally not thrilled by most serious Islamic countries either but never to the point that I support going to war against them.
Not just in Congress, Marlene. Nazis have also infiltrated state legislatures. Here in Fla, Desantis is Mussolini to Trump’s Hitler. We have Project 2025 being put into action, we have a “state guard” of brown shirts who answer only to Desantis, and there is an unspoken threat to anyone who dares disagree with Desantis. I’m going to stay with my kids for a few days around the election, because I do believe the threat of violence is real.
Jen, DeSantis is a frigging nightmare for Florida. The sooner he goes, the better. I know what’s going on FLA because I have friends there and they abhor him. I have heard about his guards harassing older women. What a pig he is!
Truly! He’s a pompous jerk who, along with his supermajority, changed the Constitution in Fla so he could run for President while governor. My guess? Either a change again so he can try to remain in office in Fla past his two term limit, or another attempt at the Oval. He’s smarter-he knows what he is doing and is INTENTIONALLY cruel to migrants, lgbtq, folks suffering from hurricanes again and again and again, and anyone who doesn’t agree with him. A truly repugnant human in every way-and clearly reps the MAGA nazi minions the former Republican party has become.
Except for the “intellectual” part, it really does describe Trump to a tee. The “intellectual” part comes with JD Vance, Project 2025, and the Heritage Foundation with a lot of Federalist Society thrown in. It’s horrifying to read what Thompson wrote and to realize that we’re witnessing the same playbook all over again. VOTE BLUE!!!
Cast your mind forward. Votes have been cast. Counting has started and majorities are recorded voting for Harris/Walz. Mr Trump refuses to accept that. People representing Mr Trump appear at the polling places and destroy evidence, claiming that all those votes are illegal a Mr Trump is the winner. Instantly, Those of Trumps party begin taking military control. At this point, the current government intervenes. And then.., This seems a more and more likely scenario. Are there pla sin pl e to respond to this next step, which follows history and can be expected?!?
You imply civil war. I fear we are in a much too modern and "civilized" society for that to actually happen here. And the strength of a military like the US has would be hard to overcome with a civilian rebel militia. They have the big guns. Mostly, at best, we have rocks and pitch forks.
I disagree. I think it’s damn well possible that this could flare up into a civil war. And the ugliness of it will depend on who will start the riots. If it’s the MAGAts coming “to the rescue”, it could get pretty ugly: remember that these people find it completely normal to stack up on full-automatic assault rifles - for “self-defense” of course…
I agree Mike. I have an older brother who is an ex-Green Beret. He is right here in sunny, happy go lucky, California. He lives among us as a wanna be fascist. Years ago, he told me that Tucker Carlson should be the only journalist for Americans to listen to. My head exploded!!!
I was aghast.
I now see his coded IG posts. There are plans afoot and no one is safe. The MAGA orcs are among us all, everywhere, and they can’t wait to unleash their fury at our “liberal mindset.” They see a Führer Vance in the near future. They cannot let democracy win now. They are too close and powerful to ending it all now and will do everything in their power to take it from the rest of us.
That's exactly what I meant. And none of us here can wrap our head around this. None of us in Heather's community can understand how people can desire war so much, and long so much to kill other people in the most bloody and painful way possible, "because they deserve it". As much as we loathe the MAGAts, none of us here is actually longing to go out in the streets with a machine gun and kill them one by one. The MAGAts, however, are very much willing to do so. And that's what I mean by "never underestimate your enemy": never underestimate the seething hate these people have for us "snowflake pc libtards"...
Yes there are quite a lot of plans in place all over the country that have been in process for many months. There was a review by Joyce Vance (one of her five questions features) of a lawyer who is handling all that and reports good progress of legal, police, sheriffs etc. groups (besides Marc Elias and the thousands of lawyers) preparing
Well I have been on this Substack saying this over and over but screaming about the horrors of the mainstream media as one of the enemies, and isolating them from our opinions doesn't exactly work the way you would want it to work. Supporting them, urging then to write the appropriate stories doesn't guarantee success but I do believe it has a lot better chance then making them our enemies.
As long s MSM has a ad-based/shareholder-profit business model, we will get the drivel infortainment they put out. They are beholden to shareholders. Not democracy. We are fools to bang our heads on the wall whailing about the “Fourth-Estate”. That went the way of the Fairness Doctrine. Some reporters do try to deliver the information we need. But, as humans, they need to pay their rent and mortgages too. And when your work must first pass an editor whose eye is on shareholder-value, good luck being the Beacon-of-Truth. This reality frustrates many of us. It leads many to conclude that the whole of MSM has autocratic tendencies. And others to slap back that their frustration as based on ignorance. We are all trying to work out in real time the Info War we are in. The fog is thick, manufactured, and meant to disorient, frustrate, and divide us. Heather Cox Richardson on substack has been my Fourth-Estate.
Exactly! I haven’t read a newspaper or watched any network news in about 2 years. Most of my news, info., etc. comes from HCR and others on Substack. I do watch some political speeches, the DNC national convention, and I’m very well aware of what’s going on. It may appear that I’ve got my head in the sand, but just ask my family and friends how politically aware I am! I’m 77 years old and sure don’t want to live what is left to me on this earth under a Fascist regime. I fear greatly for my grandson.
Sad to have to point this out but that "isolationism" (thinking that Heather's column is somehow a replacement for mainstream media) is just as myopic and dangerous (as a threat to liberal society) as the right wing MAGA embrace of Fox News. Do yourselves a favor and start looking at some of the best MSM like the NYT, maybe you would at least become a little more open minded about things. This is how isolation occurs, by self isolation from multiple points of view and by ignoring unbiased sources. Writing off the best of the MSM will be another of the nails in our own coffins.
IMHO, one issue is that the MSM is so siloed nowadays. Some ARE coming around and reporting accurately, while some are slow on the uptake or not showing alarm at all (it’s a 5-alarm as far as I’m concerned).
I would agree that MSM is often siloed. My complaint here has never been that there aren't biased components of the mainstream media, but that to suggest that they are ALL against us is nonsensical. And certainly the idea that many do not recognize the potential dangers early enough is in and of itself dangerous. But to turn them into enemies will do more harm than good. .
Having German family and genes I always wondered (somewhat ashamedly, though my German grandfather fought the Nazis in WW2) how could a brilliant, enlightened people be turned to such dark cruelty and hate? I hope we don’t keep going down this path, but increasingly I see how a relatively good, brilliant, energetic country like ours can be sabotaged and twisted against itself. That being said, as we desperately fight for what’s right within this country, perhaps you too need a little rebalancing?
Breathe. Exercise. Channel the parasympathetic nervous system that is also being trashed in our bodies by this constant outrage:
I’m here because my grandfather emigrated to the US before 1900. I never met him. His character was totally above reproach. He became a citizen, married my wonderful grandmother and had my mom and her brother. He settled in Las Vegas, NM and became a respected member of the community. He left behind seven siblings in Germany and some became Hitler’s victims. I truly believe that the loss of so much family broke his heart as he passed away in 1945.
Yes the grief ripples through generations after, with doing family genealogy, even though my grandfather came over just before the Civil War, he left a very large family behind. I now know of at least 13 cousins who perished in five of the camps.
From the little I know of world history, I suspect that there are few societies free of sociopathic episodes. There seems to be an "evil" side to human nature that we are fools not to recognize as part of human nature, and preemptively discourage. Demagogues have prospered for centuries by calling this forward in the angry and unselfaware, vending phony flattery of "master race", etc. Do we not detect regretted episodes and abiding flickers of selfishness in our own character? I suspect that humility walks side by side with compassion.
I come from a similar background. I remember with fine German Army officers in Afghanistan who expressed shame about the Nazis. Being a diplomat, I said, sincerely, that had I been a live in 1900, I would have viewed 'Germania' (i.e., Germany, Austria, and Northern Switzerland), I would have viewed Germany as the greatest civilization on Earth in terms of science, the arts, philosophy. One thing for sure, I would never have anticipated the havoc and harm that Germany would bring before 1950.
P.S., there is literature out there, however, showing the under-currents of anti-Semitism rising to a fever pitch long before the dark-stars aligned for the Nazis. "Hitler's Willing Executioners" by Dr Daniel Jonah Goldhagen comes to mind. Ironically it was best-seller in Germany before I had heard of it. A German colleague in N.Y.C. recommended it to me.
P.P.S., Important essay by Joyce Vance; tucked inside it is an arresting and inspiring profile of courage. Such normally unseen displays of principle over preference -- of the means sullying or ennobling the ends -- need more air-time. https://joycevance.substack.com/p/first-amendment-rights-for-everyone
It helps to consider your body as its own life form to be listened to and attended to and not just some kind of apparatus that you live in. As a trigger point myotherapist I can attest to significant progress to be had by helping people understand the vitality of our existence being essentially regulated by what we do and what we know about self-care.
Heather always finds a chapter in history that beautifully overlays current events, making it impossible to miss the comparison. It is shocking to see what appears to be a close race when the choices seem so disparate for some of us.
The division between the pro-Trump and never-Trump factions is vast and perplexing. I hope that the poll data is as far off the mark as it was in the previous two elections, and the inscrutable undecided voters show up for Harris and turn this nail-biter into a landslide. If I wish hard enough, maybe it will come to be.
I think you are seriously misreading the polling history from 2020. The poll data in 2020 was far off the mark in that they predicted a 10+% blowout by Biden and Trump beat their predictions by 3-4%. Still not enough to win in 2020 thankfully but the polls are closer in 2024. So if 2020 repeats that foreshadows a close Trump victory.
I do understand the 2020 polling data as much as it can be understood. It had the largest error in over 40 years of polling. The 22 midterms polling was fairly accurate, although there were many partisan polls that skewed toward Trump but were shown to be erroneous by the actual results. There have been some significant changes in polling methods in 2024 - larger polling organizations have broadened their polling methods to include online, written and telephone data instead of telephone only. There are also many more polling organizations with many of them highly partisan, which could skew the actual results considerably. It's hard to draw and solid conclusions from the polling results.
Expect Nate Cohn at the NYT to continue running his curated "polling" horror story right down to the wire at which point Harris v Trump will be a tie or maybe Trump will be proclaimed up by a point. Cohn will continue to manipulate the daily results by including Trump biased polls and ignoring polls that show Kamala up by 3-5 points.........
While terrifying Liberals, Cohn and his polling staff are publishing self doubting articles explaining that polls can frequently be wrong, sometimes beyond the margin of error. WOW! Who knew???.......
Please, please, ignore the daily polls. Pollsters simply can't reach too many voting groups that will decide the election. Cohn is just fabricating results to sell newspapers.....
Meanwhile, the Times adheres to it's "centrist" political view, regardless of the threat from Trump. The paper has so lost its soul, my recommendation to the Times would be....
Stop trying to publish the news and change your moniker to "All the recipes and word games fit to print". The paper would have a better shot at the truth.
There's a well-known quote attributed to Sinclair Lewis, "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the Flag and carrying a Bible."
And I pray daily for the safety of my co-religionists in Iran, the Baha'is, who are living (and dying) under conditions we might see in a Christian Nationalist America.
As a Baha'i also, I say the prayer for America and pray for our fellow believers in Iran and elsewhere. I had always thought I was "safe" to practice my Faith and now fear it will be taken away.
As a Christian, I believe you should have the right to practice whatever faith you follow or even no faith. The Founders were wise to establish separation of religion and state. I can’t stand Christian Nationalism, because to me it’s a direct descendant of slaveholder Christianity and misuses religious belief as an excuse for a power grab to engage in political dominance. It also tends to make people hostile toward religion in general. The Christian Nationalists think their political and social dominance of the nation should continue forever. It would be a nightmare for everyone else.
So timely. Spread this essay far and wide on social media.
I have touted “It Can’t Happen Here” by Sinclair Lewis for the past several years. Way back in 1935, he saw and foretold the danger of the Nazis and how easily the same tragedy could unfold in America. The plot unfolds in rural Vermont as the fascists begin to take hold of power and expel FDR from the presidency. It becomes increasingly ugly and scary. Reading it in today's super-charged political atmosphere, you cannot help but be amazed at the similarities between what Lewis saw in contemporary Germany and possibly happening here, too, and the stated plans of Trump and his MAGA fanatics.
Please get a copy of this book immediately and read it now; you will be glad you did.
I’ve said so many times that Trump is the modern day Hitler in his words, deeds, composure and character. To threaten our fellow Americans in the manner he does is exactly reminiscent of the 1930’s. This is not the America I grew up in. We cannot let him into office again. All Americans need to be educated about what we’re in for if he succeeds.
Richard I don't know how old you are, I am 73, but the America I grew up in was a racist country that denigrated anyone of color, black, brown or yellow, that hated anyone who wasn't Christian and that included not only atheists like myself and family, Moslems, Hindus but even Catholics for quite a while (at least until the election of JFK), and cherished only one thing... money. So I would say this probably IS the America you grew up in, only on steroids. I wish it weren't so but it seems like we are just repeating everything that had happened before.
Agreed, and thank you for your comments which are spot on. This all coalesced for me when l read Rachel Madow’s “Prequel” and said to myself: The book is so aptly named, and OMG, it’s happening again. I heartily recommend it to all. By the way, I just turned 80 and hope our world isn’t slipping away from reality.
I am afraid as well. I am embarking on a seven swing state GOTV campaign to use kind words on water bottle stickers to subtly influence good people to vote. The stickers say “VOTE, you make the difference.” They have joyful nonpartisan colors.
The fascist tactics being used are meant to disaffect voters. We need to counter these attempts. It is not too late, many intermittent voters are not giving this election much attention. Their reasoning is not as important as their vote. If good people stay home, we lose not just the election but a way of life.
Here we go . I have no bone in my body that could ever consider joining a fascist group. Not ever. I’m not afraid of them or for my fate in that regard. I voted straight BLUE today . That part is done. We shall see if America is buying the fascism or staying the course in about 15-16 days. If the outcome is for the worst then I know my life is likely considerably shorter but I will not be silenced . Not by trump not by his ilk. Not without an ugly fight. But fight I will and I will speak truth to power while I live. Yes it’s hard to imagine America being as bad as 1930’s Germany but it did happen. Who knows . They didn’t have the internet and that still may be a game changer even if it’s largely a disappointing wasteland right now .
We have politicians banning books, one saying “ some folks need killing”, we all know what trump says and many republicans are already goose stepping behind him. I’m sure he owns a copy of Mein kampf ,if not a signed one. Republicans have been pretty successful getting America to this point . Worry is legitimate.
Incredibly chilling and well written history lesson.
On MSNBC Today, in the 'Joy Reid Show', Joy pointed-out that both Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel are Immigrants from Countries without a Deep Democratic Tradition... Neither believes in Democratic Discourse, but rather in a $$$ defined Autocracy... They both believe that they have SuperHuman Intelligence... I suspect that in the Event of a DJT Victory, they expect 'Multiples' on their $$$ Investments in a DJT/Vance Victory...
Both of them are products of Apartheid South Africa, which is why they are fascists and racists. I'd be fine with cancelling their citizenship papers and deporting them.
TC, I was living in the Cape and not yet 9 years old in June 1948 when Malan and his Herstigte Nasionale Party came to power. I left South Africa with my parents over a year later.
I have often wondered what would have become of me if I had grown up there. The more so as my love of the land went deep -- it took me six years to accept that I would not be returning.
Simple. Either acceptance of the conditioning a white kid could expect there, even if his parents and schooling were unconnected with Afrikaner nationalism; or jail... or worse.
Even at age 8, I was thinking for myself, questioning, questioning, but skeptical about many of the answers I was receiving from adults. The most important teaching I had received from my mother, and even if I found it hard to understand the religious aspect of what she told, I took the message to heart:
We are all the children of the one God, so we human beings are all brothers and sisters; regardless of our differences, we are family, and so we must behave towards one another as brothers and sisters. The worst crime possible is to harm or kill others because they look different or have different beliefs.
My mother called this "the crime against God".
I know now what caused her to say these things to me in a darkened room. My parents had just received from my Dad's first cousin, a senior officer in the British medical corps who opened two Nazi concentration camps in 1945, documents and photographs of the second camp: Bergen-Belsen.
Given this message, my skepticism and my feelings about what I saw all around me, I came away deeply opposed to what I saw as the petty tyranny of Apartheid, and the conviction of all humans' deep underlying equality has stayed with me ever since.
I'm not sure that Apartheid conditioning is responsible for Thiel's and Musk's belief in their own superiority, but the combination of intellectual and material wealth makes for the most potent of delusions. These men are titans who take themselves for gods.
ADDENDUM: Christ's warnings about the inherent dangers of wealth apply to ALL acquisitions that are less than essential. These include intellectual wealth, social status and all forms of power in this world, including spiritual power. The problem is not with wealth in itself but with its effect upon us, how we relate to it, for attachment to all the things "added unto" us can so gum us up that we're no longer free to become what we really are. Things, money, status, power come to possess us, not we them...
Uneducated white men are the bulk of Trump's supporters. They believe Trump, Musk, Thiel and the other billionaires who blast their Fascism uninterrupted throughout much of the media.
CNN, the Washington Post and even The NY Times are beginning to report on Trump's mental instability and his Fascist comments, but is it too late to affect the election?
You mentioned what the problem is....."beginning to report".....
Gary, I thought all the white guys sitting behind death star in Latrobe thought his remarks about Palmer were funny as they all had locker room talk grins. So many have his same views about the world and that include female MAGAs as well. Peter reminds us too of why these people have no idea of what Jesus taught. I have reported here that quote of the week, maybe year, from a MAGA. "Jesus is wrong". The need for carte blanche (provided by death star) for expressing hatred is truly strong.
Many many people have already voted. I doubt there are that many undecided who could sway the election. They are reporting on Trump too late.
I give these media no credit. I feel they are reacting to reader blow back, plus the level of ugly crazy getting so high they simply have been embarrassed (not shamed) into reporting, along with a soupcon of hedging bets although that's an uneven game since one side will extract retribution for criticism if they win and the other won't.
DJT's Minions can Receive Information, but are they capable of assimilating it, and changing their Minds? I am Skeptical... I would Venture that they 'Feel', not 'Reason' thru Life... They 'Follow' rather then Question...
The Melting Pumpkin says.."I like the uneducated"...and does the "accordian hands rapist" routine.....Heritage 2025 Cult plans want to eliminate the Department of Education..
The set up for dictataorship is up front and centre.
Why not deport the Magat enimies of America?
Yes. Too little, too late.
NO!!! Many have not voted yet, so we still have time! Never give up!
Yes. It's too late. Brainwashed humans simply cannot mentally any process information that doesn't match their programming. We in the USA promote this conversion of human minds with our liberal definition of free speech and the invention of technology that makes speech with negligible cost. Then we add a a legal system that is unsuited for modern life due to it's archaic "due process".
The stones hanging around our necks chokes our breath and then breaks our backs.
And these pompous media "giants"? The high windows are waiting. Their one dollar sales pitches will soon be gone.
I find difficult to find reliable numbers, but most likely a small plurality of white women voted for Trump. Pretty close to an even split compared to the proportion of white men who voted for Trump, but enough white women voted for him that they don't get to be absolved of responsibility.
Finally, right?
Peter, I appreciate your powerful personal story including and not limited to you being raised to embody inclusion.
Jennifer, so did I. We could not go to South Africa during the summer break while we were in the Peace Corps because of apartheid. We went to Egypt instead and were actually at that time able to go into Tut's tomb. Much later we won a trip to South Africa from all classical radio in Portland. We saw lots of black people living in poverty still and I thought the white South Africans were lucky to have Nelson Mandela as the first president after apartheid ceased to be official policy. We went past a large multistoried building where people had been put into various racial categories.
Likewise
Peter: What differentiates Musk and Thiel from Mark Cuban? Cuban's background is not South African but Romanian Jewish and Lithuanian, but the wealth is there. I think Heather's article that includes the description by Dorothy Thompson about the characteristics of those who turn Nazi hits the nail on the head. However, the issue is that you can't prevent people from having those characteristics unless there is a long-term plan to revamp the educational system to include critical thinking skills and civics info. I am just hoping the election will turn out positively.
Dorothy Thompson saw Nazis up close and personal and her account of who "goes Nazi" seems to me to be spot on. HCR's article is powerful.
I think what you wrote may have the answer. Cuban's background is Lithuanian, Romanian (talk about Ceausescu being a deterrent to being fascist!), and Jewish. His wonder Cost Plus company is (literally) saving my daughter close to $4,200 for one of her medications! God bless Mark Cuban!
Musk, Thiel and Cuban are Randians. It’s a truly destructive philosophy.
Re: Critical Thinking Skills & Civics Info
Janan
I believe & think that your analysis & prescription for mitigating the vast numbers of people likely to “turn Nazi” is spot on.
Alas, the extreme right wing (God Bless them, for aren’t they our wayward brothers & sisters?)MAGA-Nazis are too thin-skinned to allow “critical thinking & civics info” to pierce the grievance filled racist bubbles in which they live, and their psyches dwell, fester, and mutate.
They don’t want their kids to learn civics info and critical thinking skills that will set them free, and alienate their kids from their cherished White Supremacist & unapologetic cultural traditions.
If a miracle were to happen and thereby standardize “critical thinking skills & civics,” the Nazi incubator parents would homeschool their kids or find/found a parochial school.
“The issue is that you can't prevent people from having those characteristics unless there is a long-term plan to revamp the educational system to include critical thinking skills and civics info.”
Yes. Although perhaps rather than writing "spiritual power", would a better way to express it be "religious power"? Jesus certainly had spiritual power, as does H.H. the Dalai Lama, as did Mahatma Gandhi, and countless other great spiritual leaders past and present, women and men.
kdsherpa, I do see what you're getting at but, first, distinctions between the two aren't always obvious and, more to the point, what could be more grave than the abuse of spiritual power?
This does happen, as with all forms of power.
Maybe, Saying no. 44 in the Gospel of Thomas addresses this.
Jesus said:
"Whoever blasphemes against the Father will be forgiven, and whoever blasphemes against the Son will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven either on earth or in heaven."
Mammon comes in many forms.
Hi Peter, knowing you originated in South Africa, I’ll tell you a story. Before I settled in Florence, Italy in 1977, while traveling on my student Euro pass one hot day as many passengers often stood by opened windows on the trains fro catch a breeze, I began chatting with a man standing next to me. By his accent, I knew he was from South Africa. We were just shooting the breeze when he asked me why not move to South Africa. I asked him why and he to,d me the labor was cheap. After a brief pause, I quietly returned to my seat without answering him and reflected on his natural racism.
After spending days in a pensioni in Florence having gotten the lay of the land and I knew where the cheap places to eat were, I invited two dorm mates out to the university of Florence cafeteria dinner being about 40 cents American. One boy was Dutch and the other Rhodesian. When we took our trays, it was crowded and no tables were available. I saw one in the distance with a Nigerian boy eating by himself and walked over and asked him if we could join him. Yes he said I I sat down, the Dutch boy sat down but when the Rhodesian neared he paused, looked around and suggest we sit at another table already occupied. I resisted but he went over to another table. I k ew what was happening. I never knew if the Nigerian picked up on it but after a short few minutes, the African boy finished eating and left and at that moment, the Rhodesian came over to sit down. I immediately told him he wasn’t welcomed at our table. The Dutch boy asked to forgive but I refused and told him he had insulted my hosting them. The next morning I arose early to pee and I noticed the bunk bed where the Rhodesian boy slept was carefully made up and he left.
I recall feeling sad that day because I had this notion that us young generation were going to resist the biases of the older generation and the reality was that it wasn’t going to happen. At least it didn’t for me that day. And I wondered if that Rhodesian boy finally learned right from wrong all these years later.
I could tell you quite a few, but no, I wasn't born in South Africa, I spent three years there with my parents -- Dad, a naval officer -- as a kid, from late 1946 to late 1949. Those years marked my life.
I find myself agreeing with much of what you say, but I'm not sure what you mean by intellectual wealth. If you mean gifted with intelligence, then while Musk for instance seems perhaps average or a bit above average (which is pretty low apparently), he has not achieved his wealth by powering himself up there through sheer intellectual ability. He began with advantages of funding and blew past obstacles others might have been slowed down by like laws and morals and ethics while amassing to himself wealth which eventually itself begat wealth. Just looking at Xitter, one sees that past a certain point of wealth one no longer needs to be smart or choose wisely because the margin for error and stupidity is just so large.
If by intellectual wealth you mean access to formal education and the real absorption of education's gifts, or a wealth of high quality information through informal channels, then I would propose that it is a dearth of these types of personal wealth that produces petty men with petty (yet grandiose) goals of power.
If you mean these guys were sent to the best schools to acquire the mechanical tools for gathering wealth while skipping classes that might have enriched their spirits and given them a broader education, then okay... I think I'd call that access to opportunities others are restricted from accessing. I'd have to think hard to come up with a succinct way of saying that phrase. Entitlement comes close but isn't specific enough.
I'd like to come back to you on this, but it is very late here in Europe and I'm tired.
Maybe "intellectual wealth" is not an ideal term for what I'm referring to, but isn't it obvious that there is something vain and beside the point about the accumulation of knowledge for its own sake, especially when no wisdom accrues to the inveterate collector? Typically, some people accumulate knowledge as a means to power. Again, power for its own sake, at best to free oneself so that one can do whatever one likes without let or hindrance. At worst, to manipulate others.
Because of the information work I did as a young man, I developed a magpie's instincts. But... did I, do I really need to carry so much junk around with me?
The main point is surely to avoid accumulating what is not useful to anyone and, rather, to accumulate only what will help free oneself of conditioning and make for inner freedom.
Plainly, there's nothing wrong with being knowledgeable, nothing wrong with expertise, but the current popular rejection of experts is not entirely a matter of violent ignorance on the part of those who rubbish them, it is also -- more important -- a response to those who shut themselves up in ivory towers and allow their professional mask to take over from their human face.
It's not so much what we do as how we relate to our actions and whether they free us to find our true selves or simply feed bad habits.
Usually, I feel happy when one or two people for whom I have special respect express a liking for something I have written, or add a perceptive comment of their own.
I want to say I am rather surprised, and most gratified, that something like the considerations in this Addendum, which may seem abstruse to people today, should apparently touch quite a few members of this community, where we are concerned primarily with current events in historical context.
But is this not a time that compels us all to get back down to basics?
Yes, indeed! Very much so.
Absolutely Peter.
I would argue that the first 3 of the Ten Commandments tell us the same thing, and Jesus just spelled out what false Gods were.
I shared your post to Facebook. It was too good not to share with my friends.
Once again thank you
Tevye of "Fiddler on the Roof" “If I Were a Rich Man,” including this exquisite line: “When you’re rich, they think you really know.”
As some one who “loves” South Africa I want to comment. How could I not “love” South Africa ? Posh resorts, magnificent animals, fantastic scenery, great food and wine ! Rolling and scheduled power outages, crumbling townships and infrastructure and the malaise of a Mandelian promise gone frighteningly wrong. I had a high school friend who met and married a South African Boer she met at UCLA in the 60s. She was an orphan and we all paid for her 6 week tramp steamer sea voyage to Durban so she could meet his family and get married. She went on to have 6 children and a very interesting life- sending the amah out to search the yard for poisonous snakes before the children went out, being robbed one New Years Eve while in Formal dress by a gang in their driveway, and being widowed in a foreign land. My husband and I were in the wine country and met her youngest son who was a student at the University in Stellenbosch for a drink. It was chilling. He was a very handsome, half American ………. nazi. Our friend was still alive but very ill so I could never ask her” how” ? I have been alive and have seen it all - the great promises and the thudding reality. Maybe, one more time, I can live in a time of great promise.
Joan, I'm thinking you have some writing skills you haven't shared before; At least to my recollection. Brava ~
WOW!!! The way you wrote this, the two extremes belong together existing together, HIT ME so hard, Thank you more than words can say.
Seems to me that I find a steady correlation between some god lovers who handily interpret their supposed love for the supreme aspect of it that they translate into being one on earth i.e. if Jesus could be half god why not them?
And then be godlike because of their dominance with money.
Dorothy Thompson summed up Trump in one fell swoop of a sentence. He "is no longer a man. He is a religion."
The problem's with people's acquired IDEA of God, which they confuse with the object of their belief. Only, the very idea of God as an object of anything or anyone makes no sense. Some may, of course, take your last two phrases literally -- which I've just said in another way. Delusion.
I don't call myself "Christian", yet I take exception to the very idea of "half god", both in general and in relation to Christ. Having flesh, blood and a human form doesn't make one half anything. It is we who make ourselves into caricatures of what we are.
This is no place in which to develop discussion of man's limitless greed, for which, as Seneca remarked, all Nature is too small. But it may be useful to challenge the shards of an idea that some like to present as "Great"; too often the ultimate pretext for crime.
John Lennon wrote "God is a concept by which we measure our pain." Song title, Yoko and Me.
As a little girl, we used to sing this song each week in Sunday School: "God is Love, God is Love". Ever since then, that is how I have perceived "God". (Although prior to that, at age 3 and learning to read, I ran to my mother shouting excitedly, "Mommy! I know who God is!!" "Who?" she asked. "God is a dog!! G-O-D, D-O-G!" She was not impressed. Having said that, I sometimes wonder...
Thank you, Peter. This is a powerful comment.
Great comment Thank you.
Thank you for this poignant statement, Peter. Simply stunning.
What a beautiful person your mother was. Such a blessing to have such a wise person for your parent.
Thank you. She was my first spiritual teacher and I wish I'd been more worthy of her; but needed to learn by trial and error.
I'm sure she was thrilled by the person she saw you grow up to be. (And we all have to learn by trial and error -- for better and for worse!)
Thank you for your moving story.
"the combination of intellectual and material wealth makes for the most potent of delusions." Wow. Thank you for that truth, Peter. Your words ring of so much authenticity. I had a similar, though less intensely consequential journey in losing my (Catholic) religion. And at the time, I knew nothing of their covering up of crimes against children.
Your mother is a true Christian. Thank you for this comment.
Hiro, she was Jewish, not Christian. She was a good and wise woman who practiced love and kindness and avoided harmful actions, and what else is religion if not that? For my part, I am not formally Christian, but revere Christ.
I hope my response did not seem unkind or ungrateful. After all, yours was a true compliment.
Let’s add Rupert and make it a trio sent to Rio!
Barbara, Bill Adair, founder, or one of them, of Politifact, has a new book, "Beyond the Big Lie", which I'm currently reading. He talks about Murdock, how he bought up the Aussie papers, then the tabloid press in the UK and we know what he did here. According to an examination by the Times, "his influence has given him influence over world affairs, in a way few private citizens have ever had" I'll say!
Yeah, another rich guy know-it-all. Didn’t the UK give him a drubbing some years back over some of his tabloid “news” tactics? Like TFFFG & Elon, if he didn’t have lots & lots of money, he’d be selling timeshares in Boca Roton.
…cute…
Musk has made himself virtually indispensable to NASA and the Pentagon with Space X and Starlink. We simply have no viable alternatives. He’s actually a Canadian citizen who apparently prefers our tax structure and hopes to “improve” it further with Trump’s election.
"Musk has made himself virtually indispensable to NASA and the Pentagon with Space X and Starlink."
Do we NEED to reach for the stars, if down here we're struggling to get out of the mud?
Priorities, people!
Agreed. We haven't even begun to fully explore what is at the bottom of the sea. The expense of space exploration is hard to justify when so many issues need to be addressed on terra firma.
Defund NASA and shift the money to alternate sources of sustainable energy. With enough money, geothermal and fusion can help us with the self-inflicted Climate Catastrophe.
And why is "Starlink" a private company when millions rely on it for all manner of communications including defense and national security?
Tesla - well, I know people who back in the day would never buy a Ford because Henry Ford was an antisemite fascist....
Ah, I seem to agree with you 99.9% of the time, but I do support our funding NASA. We have, in fact, privatized too much of our space presence and thus we get Starlink which has put too much power in Musk's hands. Look at what he (did or didn't) do over the Black Sea. Toss aside whether he did or didn't - consider how trustworthy he would be if Putin were ever to request data from satellites over the US or were ever to threaten the next European nation. Could we be sure we'd be favored in any cold or hot conflict? We need to direct some funding to get more of our own communication satellites up there.
I know of people who still won’t buy a Volkswagen.
I take comfort from the fact that Luddites have been trying to quash spaceflight and other technologies since the 1960s. In the first place, freeing up that money would in no way guarantee its wise use elsewhere, and in the second place, the work of those building technologies for space exploration has delivered enormous benefits in medicine, communications, and weather forecasting.
I knew someone would say that. OK - "freeing up that money would in no way guarantee its wise use elsewhere, " maybe not, but if the guy using the money is a threat to America, why give it to HIM? Use it wisely OR unwisely on something that isn't.
And if "the work of those building technologies for space exploration has delivered enormous benefits in medicine, communications, and weather forecasting." how much of the sum total of the cost of building those technologies went on just the space side? Do you think if there had been no space side, and the money had been available for alternative research, that the "enormous benefits in medicine, communications, and weather forecasting." wouldn't have been found? After every war people remark on the enormous beneficial discoveries in medicine etc - but the war still costs an unnecessary fortune. And it all comes out of the taxpayers pocket.
Lady Emsworth -- Some of us could say that reaching for the stars does help to pull us out of the mud!
Thank you, Charlotte Vale!
Being the richest man in the world is not enough. Maybe we should rethink our priorities. Do we really have to suck up to evil, now that he has removed his mask. This applies to more than Elon.
I for one shall not buy his cars
Thank you for saying that. I would think that the Telsa is doomed since most climate change-minded people, ie, democrats would be his market not republicans. Written with a prayer.
Nor I. .Even if a solar model comes out.
So true.
I’d do without a lot to live in a sane world
I like the suggestion that someone I read made yesterday, that the government appropriate Space X and Starlink. I am all for that.
I agree, Linda, especially since he interfered with Ukraine's communication system on at least one occasion. Like many oligarchs, he seems to aspire to power, including that of other nations' dictators.
I agree. That was when I first noticed what a right wing danger he was. Then he started supporting Putin's goals as a means to ending the war. Traitor, traitor, traitor.
Oh please, but the SC would stop such. Unless they got a slice
There ya go. Give the Supremes a cut. Better, allow Uncle Thom and Alito a free ride to outer space one direction. That auta do it. lol.
That not realistic, Linda. No, Boeing needs to be reimagined and they need to be run not by non-engineers.
I disagree. According to Matt Stoller of the Substack Big, one of the reasons planes are falling apart is because of outsourcing of maintenance, another is that they no longer have engineers in their management. Maybe 1 or 2 still.
So, no engineering considerations in their decision making. Also, tendency to shut them up if their pointing out problems costs money.
You can search through his articles on Boeing if you like. Here are some.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-time-to-nationalize-and-then?utm_source=publication-search
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-nationalization-of-boeing-begins?utm_source=publication-search
When it comes to national security, outsourcing so much to people like Musk, who is a fascist, is a big problem and other than forcing him to sell it to some other fascist oligarch I see no other way around his ownership of these and access to highly sensitive information I would not share with my high schooler, let alone anyone else whose frontal cortex is not fully developed, usually between 24-30.
Boeing was run from the beginning by engineers. Boeing was moved out of Seattle, into Chicago by the financial people who were getting out of the constant oversight of retired Boeing engineers, that ruined the company.
You are not alone my friend!!!
In 1950, Truman nationalized railroads, in anticipation of a strike that he said would reduce America's ability to maintain it's security, in particular with the impeding Korean War looming into full out conflict. Truman used the army to keep the railroads running. I'm not saying the situation is the same with Musk and his control over vital space access machinery, don't know about Thiel other than he's Vance's puppet master, but the incident illustrates the fact that thinking out of the box and standing up to bullies who endanger the security of our nation shouldn't be tolerated and there are things we can do as a nation, with a good leader (like Kamala Harris) to see the truth and do the right thing for the good of the country.
Truman didnt nationalize the railroads, he just put the military in temporary control of their operations. In a year or so the unions and the companies settled under terms put down by Truman.
I can only Hope that Kamala can stand up to the big boys. Her history as a prosecutor gives credibility, but God, what a list of greedy guys she's up against.
Very true. Boeing Aircraft has become a second rate company unfortunately. It needs to be run by engineers not super high paid bonus administrators who probably don’t work inside the very plants that manufacture planes and rockets.
i think his Canadian side was a relatively brief passage, before emigrating to the US. He sounds like an Ayn Rand enthusiast. Eg Greenspan. Many others, I'm sure, and male.
“Never put all of your eggs in one basket”, is how the saying goes.
Diane, probably the war on the regulatory state is also more attractive here. Not to mention the corruption of sufficient numbers of elected representatives who can be bought and lobbied by those oligarchs.
Why to take such enormous risk by depending on a such unstable and genius guy?
Agree with you there. While his mum was from Canada, it seems like the values he most internalized were those of Apartheid.
A Fireside Chat
(From "Donald's Vanity Tantrums")
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt began a series of informal radio chats to the American public during a turbulent time in the 1930s. The radio back then was to communicating as Twitter is today. Here is an excerpt:
“My fellow Americans, it is whispered by some that only by abandoning our freedom, our ideals, our way of life, can we rebuild our defenses adequately, can we match the strength of the aggressors. …I do not share these fears.”
Trump demands a quaint, televised, fireside chat to compete with FDR. Here is a sneak preview:
“My friends, Hillary Clinton will never see the inside of the White House again as long as I live.
“You people love me so much that I know you want to keep me as your president for life. The Constitution now allows this extended appointment of the executive branch. Our blessed homeland needs me to lead it. I have authorized The Enabling Act, borrowed from German Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s proposal to restrict powers of the Reichstag in 1933. His SS troops made legislators give up their civil liberties and transfer state powers to the Reich government. I’m pleased to tell you that the Democrats will sign away their legislative powers while my ICE agents surround the House of Representatives. I have the power to dissolve Congress and allow my Cabinet to pass much needed laws to Make America Great Again. And I pledge to you that all fake impeachment activity to convict me has ended.
“I also pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country. And we will remove all undocumented immigrants that are poisoning the blood of our country. And we will remove the portrait of African-born Barack Hussein Obama from the White House wall.
“My first act tomorrow will be to have House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Shiftless Adam Schiff picked up for questioning to ascertain their patriotism for the United States.
“I know I’ve been accused of a quid pro quo with Ukraine. There is nothing wrong with finding the truth about liars and cheats like Slow Joe Biden. And there’s nothing wrong asking a nation to help with uncovering wrongdoing by a corrupt man. As your President for Life, I will always tell you the truth. When I make a promise to you, I keep it.
“This concludes the first of my fireside chats. I can’t wait to tell you what I have in store for other scum Trump haters.”
(I don't dispute anything of what Heather has written. Nor the quotes from Dorothy Thompson. What I do find myself apparently in conflict here with other opinions is how we got to this place and time. I tend on the contrarian and I sense the divisions in our society, the blame game mixed with the sins of our past, The iconic Supreme Court 2010 decision Citizens United opening up unlimited corporate campaign financing where "We, the People' are no longer competitive, the corrupting influencer on all who partake of this poison wine, and now we have AI distorting reality. There is now a difficult path ahead to extend American Democracy as we have known it. Only the Good Witches of the North can save us now.)
Bill, I agree with you about Citizens United. Obama warned us about the dangers of unlimited cash. It's hard to believe that Margaret Chase Smith attempted to run for the Presidency offering to accept no donations from anyone-- corporate or private.
Sadly, it can't be done on almost every level of government.
But another loud influential voice we tend to overlook are the myriad lobbyists supported by the well heeled corporations and the ultra wealthy.
Gary, I think the oligarchy has decided to replace civil service workers with lobbyists. By cutting the regulatory departments to the point that they can no longer do their jobs, the administrative state now relies on self-policing by corporations (like Boeing) to assure safety.
And since the expertise of federal employees is being sidelined by Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, legislators are free to rely on lobbyists to write the rules governing their own business practices.
The courts have also been complicit and/or overwhelmed by sophisticated lobbying. Anti-monopoly laws were no longer even taught in law schools and Biden’s resurrection of intervening in monopolies is no doubt one reason the corporate money is flooding into the campaign of the Former Grifter-in-Chief.
I despair that the rebuilding of healthy, honest checks and balances is even possible unless the GOP is strangled and new laws, new enforcement mechanisms and new staffing are implemented. Not sure even the democrats are willing to bite the corporate hands that fund them.
And with their Immunity ruling, the SCOTUS has prepared the ground nicely for Donald's fever dreams to be realized.
I wrote and published my book 4 years ago before Trump had been compared to Adolf Hitler.
It's shocking how in America in the 2020s, the comparisons of Trump to Hitler become truer every day, not less true.
I remember when dems self-policed dems over any Trump/Hitler comparisons. Yet here we are. We let our fear of appearing alarmist, manipulative, and partial hobble the ability to stop this nightmare before it became inevitable.
Not just of the North. East West and South and the middle.
The Wizard of Oz said North only, lol. My favorite all time movie. If I could die watching a movie, it would be that movie. We waiting every season for the movie to be shown on TV.
There is nothing quaint about Trump. He is growing nastier and nastier in his desperation to get the ugly people out to the polls. He gets help from his Russian Bots, and the MAGAs in office. Andra Watkins spoke to Democrats Abroad about Christian Nationalists, and since Trump is apparently planning on implementing their document for government Project 2025, and turning us into a Christian Nationalist Theocracy, we need to make sure he does not get in by each of us doing our part.
TC, the irony is that its UnAmerican to expel UnAmericans, right? We used to trust our neighbors to ostracize them, render them ineffective
Money has bought the propaganda that has infected their thinking. Money has bought a Court that advocates the destruction of individual rights Money in such Smaug-like hoarding that spending a pittance of it means nothing
The Dragon is awake and circling above
The vote is our last and only sword. There is no Frodo
It’s more like paradoxical than ironic. Related to the intolerance paradox. Intolerance, if tolerated, will eliminate tolerance, so a civilized society must not tolerate intolerance. Too bad, in a way, but there is no other solution.
If there is deporting to be done they willl be doing the deport if their monster* is elected.
*JD is who they have their money on. DJT is their shill. If elected you can bet the tRump will be shoved asside or get sick, and or conveniently die.
Can we add Rupert
WoW both of them ?!!! I’ve understood that somehow it’s « not quite possible to expel them from our (country, planet, society… pick one) because of their $$$….
Just in case you're not joking, the planet has become quite small with all the technology we have and more to come. We have to figure out other ways of banning them.
Damn shame our side is so unattractive to murderous loonies.
Agreed. They are part of the “enemy withjn” that we could put out with the trash. I’m not a fan of deportation on any level, but if those naturalized folks are undermining democracy, their traitorous actions deserve nothing less than expulsion.
Jen, I don’t want to see us set a precedent by de-naturalizing or expelling people. You know where that leads…
Hi Marge! For the record-I agree with you 100%. That being said, if a legitimate threat is posed by people against our Constitution and democracy, against the very foundation of our United States, there needs to be some accountability for unAmerican activities. Maybe expulsion is the wrong answer-it probably is-but what recourse is available? Domestic terrorists, and I believe Thiel, musk, Murdock and others fall into that category, must not be allowed to continue their rampage of hatred, intentional misinformation, and attempts to murder democracy. Prosecution? Incarceration? How do we deal with them in order to preserve this precious institution?
Yesterday I happened to watch an episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver from 10 months ago. It is all about Elon Musk. This is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eo3zORUGCbM
I purchased my first Tesla in 2014 and upgraded in 2018. I love my Tesla, but in the last few years have wondered what happened to Musk. My son-in-law sold his Tesla and all his Tesla stock because of who Musk has become. To date I am remiss to sell mine, and I have been confused and wondering what happened to him, that is until I watched Oliver's show. Now I realize why he is pouring money into the Trump/Vance campaign. He wants to be able to do what he wants, buy who and what he wants, control who and what he wants, without our government's intervention in any way. And he will spend billions to accomplish that. He and Theil will control Vance and run our country however they want. I think if Trump wins Republicans will immediately invoke the 25th amendment, and put Vance in power which will allow M & T to control an awful lot from behind the scenes. Please tell me I'm wrong about this.
I confess to the same thought, TC. But then I might be part of the problem. I would contribute to Trump's deranged expulsion of all foreign-born citizens. The task, which will require an FDR-type leader, is to reign in the extreme profiteering by a few in the oil and tech businesses...the oligarchs. At a minimum, Musk must be removed from the government-X partnership. That is where the danger lies.
I didn't know this - it explains a lot. And not in a good way.
I agree they are not humans nor fit to live in our country the way they behave!
No Republican is fit to live in our country.
Can we legally do that? I've always thought that naturalization was for life.
Peter Thiel is not from South Africa. He is from Frankfort, Germany. Perhaps you were thinking of Rupert Murdoch.
Peter Thiel is from Germany, and moved to the US, but his family spent time in South Africa too, so he has absorbed his ugly ideas in more than one place. Apartheid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel
He is a White Supremacist who expects his money to protect him from the fact that he is supporting virulently anti-gay people into taking power.
https://theintercept.com/2023/03/23/peter-thiel-jeff-thomas/
Exactly. I do not think foreign born should be able to own more than 25% of any US media in total.
I don't know very much about the government at the time, but I think it was a toxic environment that was rife with cruelty, prejudice, injustice, and violence perpetrated by white settlers, the term Boers or Afrikaners was used. I did not know that about Musk and Thiel. Thank you.
While Peter Thiel is from Germany and came as a child with his parents, I would not say that Germany has a "deep democratic tradition." Germany first had democracy for 15 years during the Weimar Republic leading from the end of WWI to 1933 when the Nazis took over. Then, in 1945 began another period of democracy for part of Germany but the other part was in an authoritarian state until 1990. So, from 1990 until now. That is not such a long time. In fact, there are many people living who have lived under an authoritarian regime, and some still who lived under 2. While Peter grew up in the US after his family immigrated, that is his family's background. Elon Musk comes from South Africa, the land of Apartheid. I don't consider it to have a long tradition of democracy either. Both of them come from countries with strong White Supremacist non-egalitarian societies and both are White Supremacists by their actions, beliefs and rhetoric. We might say it is in their DNA.
It’s truly perplexing. Elon Musk could do such great things with his wealth.
Elon Musk is not a great person. He is emotionally and socially immature like a lot of the GenZ men that Trump is trying to reach, and the Millennial men. Good luck with the latter group. All of the millennial men I worked with did not read books, were over focused on YouTube, making money, raising their children and did not vote. Their wives vote though. Given how immature these men were, perhaps that is a good thing. I spent years trying to get one of them to vote. To no avail. Basically he did not feel that the good quality of his life or that which he intends to provide for his young children will be affected either way, so why get off his routine to go out and vote.
I guess. I’m far removed from trends which is why I sometimes rub people here the wrong way. I’m a traditionalist and I feel comfortable in that skin. TV? It comes on for the 6-8 news programs maybe Frontline sometimes. No cable. Reading? I’ve been slacking but I need to start reading again my literary mentor, Mark Twain, who I have a great affinity for. I was recently almost kicked out of a Methodist church open mic for bringing my book to read a passage instead of singing my songs. The short story I recited was titled “My Cat Babe and Donald Trump Have Something in Common” and the story revolved around keeping my cat Babe from licking the oil in the frying pan least he splat diarrhea all over my house like Donald Trump did crap on the nation while in office . OMG, you should have seen what happened next. One woman stood up and tried to shout me down but I pointed out that I had two more sentences to recite and proceeded to finish how it was important to prevent Trump from gaining the White House. I felt the spirit of Mark Twain within as I walked off the stage. I got a big applause. Even sold a book and I had prepared to give them a partial donation to the good church cause but I recinded that offer. They almost banned me but they didn’t. I guess it was their generous Christian side that restrained them, lol.
Musk has reported that he has Aspergers, or, these days, the term is neurodivergent.
Musk does not need to report that for me to recognize that. A lot of people I know, who are not fascists at all, in the Aspergers spectrum as well.
More to the point, Musk has also reported that he uses ketamine.
Much of his wealth came from the American taxpayers with.his government contracts.
I totally agree. Imagine using all of that money to destroy our democracy when it could be put to such good use like advocating for peace on earth.
It does factor in,’how one is raised’ whether it’s the county/country/parent/peer groups. All influences meld and mold one.
There is without doubt too many factors -negative too as people who are ‘unhappy’ stir inwardly seeking peace, love, comfort for sure.
With the hoards of money available seems we could be a lot better off as a whole. But…
I heard another oligarch fell out a window today, and few believe it was ‘a suicide’, catching on in Russia perhaps …
How many read this marvelous HCR ‘Letter’? How many can read? Germany didn’t heed the warning, nor few of the other countries who have been ‘taken’ down that road.
I do know I will disappear if Trump wins…perhaps to start another underground RailRoad if time permits ..a definite issue..I’ve fought for the underdog since I was old enough to care…as have the many here. They called us ‘hippies’ but I was bit older. Back-to-the-landers fit too. The Silent Generation , AF Dad killed just at the end of the ‘war’. Baby Boomers. Some are now Ex-Pats, my first trip abroad opened my eyes how the Americas see themselves. Trump wasn’t the first who brought out the cracks in the system. It still needs a lot of work.
This election is pivotal. As well as ‘26 & ‘28…and and and..Blue is the hue and expect of them more carefully, my sisters and brothers…
💙💙🇺🇸VOTE.THE.BLUE.STOP.THE.COUP.ITS UP TO YOU.🇺🇸💙💙
She said “countries WITHOUT a deep Democratic tradition.”
I disagree with your reading. The German Federal Republic is 75 years’ old and after the fall of the wall, it absorbed the much smaller GDR. There has been tensions with the old East German areas for many reasons- mostly cultural and economic- but the majority of the country has been democratic since Adenauer , who had been a democratic politician during the Weimar Republic, became its first post-war Chancellor. More importantly, Germans are culturally attached to democracy and human rights - and far more than many Americans.
I am a member of Democrats Abroad in Germany, which is a very democratic American group. I am also a Brown-skinned dual German and American citizen currently living in Germany. I am surrounded by Germans who are not fully democratic in my mind, nor are they that historically aware of their privilege and who paid for it. At the same time I know Germans who are very Democratic. Many of them have lived in the US and taken on US citizenship as well.
I see commitment to Democracy in both countries, and those who are fascist. There are those who are being manipulated by Russian and other Bots, leading their on a string to think in certain ways. Both governments need to make better legislation to protect us from the manipulation on line.
Regardless if it's in their DNA, they belong in this country. We're a country that believes in Democracy and a democratic system and the rule of law. Let them go to Russia and be on Putin's cabinet.
Nazis got a bad reputation in the wake of WWII, but it seems like Republicans have canonized $$$ defined Autocracy (and aristocracy) since at least Reagan, not quite as blatantly as in the present.
Besides being Horrible Ciminals, and Insane, the Nazis lost thankfully... If DJT, and his Minions Win Power, and stay in Power... Guess how the $$$ Aristocracy will define themselves? OBW: Reagan was a B-List Actor who, once Elected, thought He & Nancy were Aristocracy...
First of all, the Nazis did not lose, they were defeated by the efforts of allied opponents.
Leonard Leo, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts Jr. Samuel Alito Jr., Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett were all raised Catholic. Which would have hobbled their rise (as would've being Black, female, and of Italian and Irish heritage) were it not for the liberalization of American society and US law achieved by progressive activists. The liberalization they are hell bent on rolling back, the civil rights laws they are turning the Constitution on its head to overturn, and the progressives they have immunized demagogue and would be dictator Donald Trump to officially persecute. Would they turn Nazi? Ha! Their Black robes barely hide their white sheets and brown shirts. While their upbringing may have instilled a taste for absolutism and authoritarianism (antithetical to the Constitution) rather than allegiance to the Golden Rule translated to civil society as "caring for the general welfare" they have a bent for greed and are draining American law of justice in order to obstruct government's ability to administer equitable taxation and reasonable regulation of industry. After the defeat of Hitler, at the Nuremberg, there were special trials for German jurists who had drained German law of justice to legalize Nazi bigotry and establish Nazi rule with its attending atrocities.
But on the front end, when Hitler's coup failed he went legit and won power through the electoral process. A victory achieved in large part by Stalin directing German Communists to split off from the German Center Right. Just as Putin aligned Jill Stein is splitting the American Leftish from the American Center Left as represented by the Democratic Party - in order to elect Trump, institute Project 2025, and establish a corporate ChristoFascist Christian Nationalist state - in which along with her fellow Trump enabler Stephen Miller, as a Jew she would be denied the very rights which have enabled her rise. (Thanks to KKK Grand Wizard and GOP gadfly David Duke's early salesmanship to his base, Putin is the avatar of American White Christian Nationalism. Duke prepared the way for Trump's allegiance to Putin and the Right's promotion of Viktor Orban. Just as American racism against Black persons prepared the way for Hitler's racist theories and atrocities.)
One wonders, as these hypocrites hollow out the foundations of democracy, what makes them think they'll survive the roof caving in?
We at least are allied and our coalition is in the struggle to defeat this American iteration of fascism.
And what is Catholicism if not a patriarchy. They pretend to honor "Mother Mary" when she is just a tool to cover up their admission of women into the power structure of the church.
Compare the number of Saints that are women to men in the Catholic Church. Just try to imagine a female priest or heaven forbid a female Pope.
The changes they would try to make can't even be imagined.
One of the American paradoxes is the
win-lose/lose-win cultural mindset which is constantly getting us into political hot water never mind other kinds of hot water too, a bipolar nation
Political campaigns are intrinsically partisan and win/lose. American politics has evolved to be a two party system - that is not intrinsic to our democratic republic, but no other parties have evolved from the ground up to effectively challenge the two parties (showing up once every four years as a spoiler candidate isn't party building.) There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a two party system - while non partisan districting, campaign finance reform, ending the Electoral College, and Ranked Choice Voting would go a long way to improve it.
That said, governing ought not be primarily partisan and win-lose. Legislating should be coming to consensus through reasoned debate of empirical evidence - that is freed of party, religious, and ideological creed. This is possible.
Lin, powerful post! Thanks
"We at least are allied, and our coalition is in the struggle to defeat this American iteration of fascism." We damn well better be. Just today, Trump called for "the kind of generals that Hitler had." This goes back to his usual Trumpian stand saying that "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" If he loses, and I suspect he will do so, law enforcement, I hope, will have a plan to tamp down in forceful fashion, the traitorous actions of Trump's minions. Assuming Trump loses, the left, alongside the Constitutionally faithful right, should have much to study and question much of the Trump right's posture during these last four years. This may well be a delicate balancing act as one has to decide where freedom of speech ends, and insurrectionist talk and action begin. We can start with Mike Johnson as he tries to explain his honest "disagreements" with Liz Cheney, who didn't buy a dime's worth of his statements.
"... the left, alongside the Constitutionally faithful right, should have much to study and question much of the Trump right's posture during these last four years."
The Trump right's posture during these last four years is the coming to fruition of the Republican posture since the time Ronald Reagan jumped in bed with Ralph Reed - Movement Conservatism with Religious Extremism. And before that the Southern Strategy.
MAGA is the ideological heir and the blood heir of the Confederacy. In his musing on his sentimental journey home, The American Scene, ex-pat Henry James writes of his visit to Richmond, Virginia. It is worth looking up. James is prescient in his observations of a society in denial of historical fact and received ethics. In order to defend the slave scheme, talk of anything and everything else must be banned from the public sphere - from political speech, news media, libraries, schools, the pulpit. In short, James describes the social apparatus of creating 'alternative facts.' Add to the rewriting of history as hagiography (Southern traitors elevated in every town square as Heritage Heroes), the intrusion of faith based irrational habits of mind - and you have a body politic which can be convinced to see Trump "as a good family man with a good heart"
- as I heard one man from Nebraska say on CSpan this morning.
The Nazis were not stupid or insane what they were proficient in their ability to RATIONALIZE. They had science, i.e. eugenics to rationalize iliminating Jews et al.
Theology too. See Gerhard Kittel.
Go read Jacob Heilbrunn's "America Last: The Right's Century Long Romance With Foreign Dictators." The Republicans have been scum for a long time. Only $18 at Amazon delivered tomorrow.
https://www.amazon.com/America-Last-Century-Long-Romance-Dictators/dp/1324095679/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3GC2IOU5SE58G&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.09BcG5yLmuYCpzuSLsS6r80gT0-y2bPCiD9baTbPbeUCsTD9pQBzlrNv9M3bi9g0._eadT17NNmnzqlsg04fO5z4YwX1q1w_ctRCnya9h2DE&dib_tag=se&keywords=america+last+jacob+heilbrunn&qid=1729580604&sprefix=America+Last%2Caps%2C612&sr=8-1
I want to read this. Unfortunately, it’s not new for some influential people to admire dictators. Some wealthy people admired Hitler and Mussolini, other famous people admired Stalin, and all of them left millions of dead in their wake.
Yeah all those millions dead, in their wake, besides those who died defeating fascism, were the OTHER. The target of our home grown fascists.
I try to avoid Amazon. I’ll look for it at my local independent bookstore. Yep, it will cost more, but Amazon and Walmart are both on my boycott list (which is very very short! LOL).
The left has its share of foibles on this topic. We all have to remember Biden's love affair with that of Netanyahu and the billions he promotes to rain down on the IDF war machine against Gazans. Although the republicans likely take the cake on this issue, some democrats also have enough blood on their hands.
What has helped Trump rise to power has been the social media, and the tacit cooperation of the legacy press. The legacy press lost its readers to all sorts of siloed media. Murdoch helped spread fascist lies. Now, unless you make an uncomfortable effort, you never know what the other side is thinking. Having a real national dialogue has become impossible. Both sides live in totally separate worlds.
I agree that the rise of fascism was expedited by social media. The spreading of lies to people who were hungry/starving for lies to satisfy their fears and hatred.
Slave owners were autocrats and dictators who established laws to increase and maintain their power. They shaped the Constitution to favor their positions and declared a civil war to maintain their way of life. What Reagan and the Rs have done is not new. Unfortunately tyranny, autocracy, dictatorship are part of America’s legacy.
And Murdoch is Australian. That's a lot of foreigners controlling America.
Imagine how Musk could benefit his 5 corporations should he become the "efficiency expert" Trump wants.
Musk, Thiel, and Vance are acolytes of Yarvin . Yarvin believes the U.S. government too sclerotic to govern, and in need of a national CEO.
“And a national CEO is called a dictator. The U.S. needs to get over its dictator phobia.”
Note that Musk’s Space X gets much of its funding from NASA and Tesla is dependent on tax credits to its buyers to sell cars. Both of those companies rely on government funding that they supposedly despise!
Apache. Again CHILLING
We’re ALL immigrants, other than the honorable Native Americans. I just don’t get why someone would deny that fact.
You can have all the money in the world but you can't buy the majority of the American people in this country who believe in Democracy. With the power of our vote, nothings is impossible.
Hopefully we can got vote them! However, it is easy to buy votes even if that is illegal!
A student at Stanford, Julie Lythcott-Haims, following a speech he gave to students at that university, told her that apartheid was "economically sound". Any moral issues were irrelevant. The point – a common one made by apologists of the apartheid state at the time – seemed to be that South Africa was much more developed than its neighbours and that life there, even for those who were systematically denied their rights, was better than it was in, say, Ethiopia or Burundi. (From "The Contrarian" by Max Chafkin)
Like the Nazis, the anti-fascists, too, would be from all walks of life. That is the value of the tour, now underway, of joint appearances of former Representative Liz Cheney and Vice President Kamala Harris. ⚖️
https://www.c-span.org/video/?539382-1/vice-president-harris-campaigns-liz-cheney-wisconsin
Ned, I may be old, but I can still lace up my boots, get out there and make some “good trouble” to resist the erosion of our democracy. Despite its flaws (we CAN & MUST do better for all Americans) I will stand at the ramparts to defend it & encourage its “growth”. ☮️🗽🇺🇸
Hooray, Barbara Keating!
P.S., Important essay by Joyce Vance; tucked inside it is an arresting and inspiring profile of courage. Such normally unseen displays of principle over preference -- of the means sullying or ennobling the ends -- need more air-time. https://joycevance.substack.com/p/first-amendment-rights-for-everyone
I am with you a 100%
The Harris and Cheney townhall moderated by Charlie Sykes on 10/21/24 in Waukesha, Wisconsin had impressive statements by both of them. Very interesting to hear Liz Cheney discuss anti-abortion laws such as in Texas. Their townhall moderated by Maria Shriver on the same day in Oakland County, Michigan was also impressive:
https://www.youtube.com/live/TmOb1fRR4X4?si=mpsP7TofUBTgri2s
Both town halls yesterday were good. Fortunately I was working from home editing photos and was able to catch them both in their entirety. I like how they had a Democratic moderator for one event and a Republican moderator for the other.
The one at noon-time in Pennsylvania was quite good, too.
I watched those town halls also. There were lengthy discussions on National Security. There were also intelligent questions from the audience on important issues. These small events calm me. Volunteering with other Democrats here is also helping to alleviate election anxiety.
Linda,
One thing that crosses my wretched little my wretched, little mind every time I hear Senator Vance take questions from the crowd -- in apparent contrast to Vice President Harris supposedly avoiding the press -- remains: ¡DAMNATION! Are these questions and reporters planted ¿or what? It seems so rehearsed.
What interests me, here, is that two women lead the charge. One basic lesson I learned in Afghanland.
¿Change the street? Negotiate with the men.
¿Change the culture? ¡Work with the women!
Yes, the fascist movement filters down from the national level to state level to city & county level. It’s composed of people from all levels! It a political plague!
Yesterday, at my early voting site, there was a man in the bed of a truck (with his company’s emblem on the side) with a huge sign that said, save America, vote Trump, blah, blah. He screamed, Took a break, and screamed some more. I said, to nobody in particular, isn’t that against the law. The man in Front of me said, I think so, they are supposed to stay so far away, don’t remember exactly how far. He was ignored. But laws don’t really stop the devoted cretins.
In Ohio, election signs and electioneering are restricted within 100 feet of a polling location, and just about every state has similar restrictions. Musk’s payments and contests in Pennsylvania are in blatant violation of Federal election law, but the SCOTUS majority would look the other way. They want to make corruption and bribery legal again.
They pretty much are all in on it. Still want to know about Kennedy and his son and the German bank. Body blow for me. Forgotten now,
The dismiss the law as something that doesn’t apply to them, like the orange narcissistic sociopath!
No police, no objection. I tried to get his plates to make a complaint. May go back tomorrow to see if he’s still there. The guy in front of me was not impressed. Yea
Thank you for not saying "yay".
Trump has proven that the law is not applied equally. Why is he still walking around after being convicted of crimes? Justice delayed is justice denied…and SCOTUS supposedly the highest law makers in the land have clearly demonstrated that applying the law to benefit their benefactors is more important than liberty and justice for all.
Alert the lead person at that voting site. The lead would know the rules about electioneering and be responsible for upholding them.
Should have done that, will if he’s still there when I go back
Perhaps a cultural plague.
Important essay by Joyce Vance; tucked inside it is an arresting and inspiring profile of courage. Such normally unseen displays of principle over preference -- of the means sullying or ennobling the ends -- need more air-time. https://joycevance.substack.com/p/first-amendment-rights-for-everyone
Yes , that may be true but we by the power of our vote can stop it.
Exactly ! When Dorothy Thompson wrote about anti-fascists being those who have something in them, “be it breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern”, she cast her net wide and she was a keen observer of the anti-fascists of her era. Who could have imagined that Generals de Gaulle and de Hautecombe (aka Leclerc), those pillars of ultra-conservatism, would come to lead the Free French Forces against the Nazis? Liz Cheney is of that mould.
Love the fertile context in which you place this emergent unity to push back fascism, Sophie; thank you. You live up to your name . . . wise. All anti-bodies to this vilely violent virus are created equal but we are not carbon copies of each other.
Mary, precisely!!!!!!!!!!! Indeed chilling. Many on this letter know that it can happen here and will happen here if the monster is elected. He is nothing more than a shill. He is too ignorant/stupid but his fascist backs know that JD is their Hitler.
Oh, yes!!
True - chilling. If we lose and Trump wins, democracy falls. Can we recover it from within? Given the military power held by those in control, probably not. As with Germany, it would require a defeat from outside forces. And, pray tell, where are those forces today? They don't exist. This is why this is the most important election not just here in the U.S., but in the history of the world. I don't feel that this is hyperbole.
No hyperbole. Where goes USA, goes the world.
The tension in the air is palatable.
And Mary, also a dark reminder of how history can repeat. Trump is holding a rally this weekend at Madison Square Garden.
Mary, I agree. I’m so glad that Heather shared Thompson’s history. Hopefully, the US public that voted for Trump in the past is now listening to people like Liz Cheney when those Republicans warn about Trump (and JD Vance).
Mary-I was glad to be introduced to Thompson. Our history and the people who fought to help us “perfect our union” reveal so much to us about the courage, love and humanity that has brought us this far against people who as Melanie said “don’t care” about others or our nation.
My thoughts, too, Mary. This newsletter is Heather at her finest: how history has examples of marvelous people who stand up against the maddening crowd and perverse individuals and who give us a compass for our times.
Chilling indeed. The parallels are terrifying... If Trump and Vance win the election, they'll have Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff and Barack Obama dangling from a gallow faster than you can say the word "unconstitutional".
Yes, Mary, I agree wholeheartedly with you.
What have we become?
It’s so ironic Mary…it seems History’s lesson are to be forgotten…and now…we find ourselves at the brink again! It’s unimaginable!!
Terrifying.....
The parallels to the rise of Nazism have repeatedly been drawn in the past few years, most eloquently by HCR tonight; will anyone listen, before it's too late?
We are listening and HCR has an ever expanding group of readers.
I love your concern and commitment but keep in mind that the number of readers here measures in the hundreds of thousands at most and mostly in states that are not swing states. In an electorate of 200 million people it is a pittance. That is why I have been struggling to fight the sentiment here that we should avoid the main stream media. We NEED the mainstream media as a strong ally and ignoring them will not make that a reality. Mark my words.
Agreed. Well stated, Jon. Ms Thompson was a high-profile member of mainstream media. My hope is that members of the mainstream media read Dr Cox Richardson. Would it not be great were the good professor to appear of Colbert or Jimmy Kimmel? That would get her words out there.
P.S., Important essay by Joyce Vance; tucked inside it is an arresting and inspiring profile of courage. Such normally unseen displays of principle over preference -- of the means sullying or ennobling the ends -- need more air-time. https://joycevance.substack.com/p/first-amendment-rights-for-everyone
And you HCR readers post great reflections and original contributions. Reading the Comments is essential after reading HCR.
A pittance, so true. We scream in the void. Money is a steamroller. And Rupert, now aided by the world’s richest man, and other cretins, rolls on.
The mainstream media is already aligned with authoritarianism.
Sheer nonsense. If you truly believe that you are in a fantasy world. Some of the MSM are not our friends but to say categorically that the entire universe of MSM is authoritarian is just to demonstrate your ignorance.
I don’t think the media outlets as a whole are authoritarian, but they are ignoring things that they shouldn’t for ratings. My biggest problems with them are their ignoring Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior, bloodthirsty statements, the false equivalence between the policies of the parties, and their treating political campaigns as a horse race while ignoring the policy differences and Trump’s dangerous policies.
On this substack we don't generally talk to one another in this manner as you just have. We don't generally call one another ignorant ( even if we briefly think someone's thinking is off for a moment). I truly hope this substack does not become an ugly place in a world of other ugly places. Civil discourse is important and has thrived here.
There are several provocateurs here that come across as harsher than many of the other commenters. There are a handful that I completely ignore, and frequently just scroll past their comments, and one or two that I read. By and large this is a civil group, which is why I like it here.
And they are not interested. Dare they lower themselves!
HCR has a million followers who read her Letters to an American. I first found her on FB in 2020-2021. I later found her on here, where I'd come to read Dan Rather's column.
This evening, Dr Cox Richardson hit a grand-slam. Nazism or its 'American Cousin' today would be an acquired taste. Oh that this brilliant essay were read by 15% of the adult population or by a third of the grown-up women. 🙏
https://nedmcdletters.blogspot.com/2016/05/letter-116-b-getting-historical.html
He triggered my fears back with the BS about Obama’s birth. Then I have watched as our institutions have bent and weaved to excuse and rationalize. The SC has given credence to BS on every level that still shocks me to my bones. The election seems anticlimactic in a way. I hope I’m wrong.
Well said JDinTX. I appreciate your perspective here; it does indeed shock me to my core what $COTUS has done.
Hear, here!
he triggered my fears the moment he was putting in Temporary members if Cabinet...didn't require any Senate approval, and when Paul Ryan gave him passes when he violated the Emoluments clause. The writing was on the wall..the GOP want him in as an autocrat ,create an oligarchy, kleptocracy
Doreen, I remember Dr Cox Richardson making power unaccountable through unconsented cabinet appointments. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nedmcdonnell3rd_is-the-us-republican-party-the-gop-activity-6455538207026085888-ALgg (from eight years ago)
Me too.
Very powerful observation, there, J.D. Thank you 'muchly'.
P.S., Important essay by Joyce Vance; tucked inside it is an arresting and inspiring profile of courage. Such normally unseen displays of principle over preference -- of the means sullying or ennobling the ends -- need more air-time. https://joycevance.substack.com/p/first-amendment-rights-for-everyone
Thanks for that link! Well said.
Step by step into the darkness.
Thanks to Faux News and the rest of the MSM that has fallen into line. Why? Because the media is owned by the wanna be fascists who all see a future Führer Vance. He has been groomed in a very short time and is pure evil.
JustRaven, this “tune” has been blaring loudly for several years now, but methinks for so many folks it has now been relegated to “elevator music” and they no longer pay attention or “hear” it. Makes me mad/sad and increases my resolve to push back. Just last week a friend gave me a “stop project 2025” button as we walked into a restaurant to meet a group for lunch…she said to me “you tried to tell us all about this and warn us over a year ago and we didn’t listen….we are listening now.” I keep banging that drum to whomever will listen….some take the time to do so, others not so much. I don’t want to preach, but do want to inform—lol….reminds me of the last two folks I shared this info with…they were the Watchtower-pamphlet folks who came to my door; I encouraged them to research it at non-partisan sites & not just take my word for it. [I usually have engaging conversations with these folks…it’s always interesting to me, a religious “none”.]
Barbara, I am glad you had success with your friend. The only thing that my retired work cohort says to my warnings about Project 2025 is "He disavowed it; don't worry" which is utter garbage.
Unfortunately I feel that I'm preaching to the choir. The others who end up being MAGA supporters don't listen. They are too entrenched. I've yet to find someone on the fence. Glad you were able to.
Shellee, it’s not that I changed anyone’s mind—they are all pretty center or center-left politically (‘cept one & we don’t discuss politics)—but they just weren’t paying attention….all I did was to encourage them to look into it. Glad the MSM (largely cable news such as MSNBC) is finally starting to cover it & sound the alarm.
The ones we are desperate to touch with the truth 👍
I’ve read and listened to the Professor’s Letter last night over and over today. He dismantled their constitution in 3 months. 3 months.
People are listening but will enough of us act before it's too late?
You are the reincarnation of Dorothy Thompson, shining truth to power. Thank you Heather.
was thinking the same thing!
G-D bless Ms Liz Cheney, always; G-D be with Vice President Harris, daily. We face a struggle I feared might come -- but wrote off as my neuroticism hard at work -- that may determine whether we persevere or perish. 🤝
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4679797/user-clip-gerald-ford-united-states
Thanks, Ned, got an error message when trying to play the vid, but was able to read the transcript below. Was a lot to take in (tired late night eyes) but was impressed by his “words” (or those of his speechwriter!). Can you imagine TFFFG saying anything, anything at all, remotely as coherent?
Yeah I am getting the same. Perhaps the link is stale. I will make a fresh search; hopefully better luck. Thank you for the heads-up, Barbara.
No luck, bummer. It is a great clip.
P.S., Important essay by Joyce Vance; tucked inside it is an arresting and inspiring profile of courage. Such normally unseen displays of principle over preference -- of the means sullying or ennobling the ends -- need more air-time. https://joycevance.substack.com/p/first-amendment-rights-for-everyone
History, rhyming.
Thank you, Heather. I am convinced that it CAN happen here. I am doing what I can to ensure that it WON'T happen here.
¿My gut? Vice President Harris wins the popular vote by five-to-seven points with a substantial majority of the Electoral College. ¿Why? Because, I believe, Trumpers are not avoiding polls while many Harris supporters ignore polling requests. ✌🏽
Ned, I too think she will win the popular vote, probably by a wider margin than did HRC or Biden…but, alas, it’s the vote counters & electoral college who might thumb the scale. That is what I worry about.
Important essay by Joyce Vance; inside it is a profile of courage. Such normally unseen displays of principle or preference -- of the means sullying or ennobling the ends -- need more air-time. https://joycevance.substack.com/p/first-amendment-rights-for-everyone
I do think polling is worthless.
There's public polling and there's internal private polling and they're quite different. It's the public one that's meant to sway us in whatever direction. I call it the Polling
Industrial Complex. In sociology practice and public polling it's the quality of the questions that makes all the difference. There are open ended questions which are not asked by the public type because they would be too complicated and nuanced to compile quickly. So what is asked are yes no questions and many of them are quite slanted, and also who is actually being polled makes a difference as well.
HCR mentions a polling watcher expert that she actually trusts -
who(?)- anybody(?)
Do not pay attention to the polls. They are meant to make us nervous and fearful.
-->> "the quality of the questions" <<-- ✅
Ned-I too am betting that a “silent majority” will speak loudly with their votes for democracy-not dictatorship.
My gut is sincere, hopefully -- big hopefully -- accurate. I am optimistic because I have to be. 🤞
I hope you are right!
As a Sunday school classmate said to me, "Let us pray, then let us vote." 🙏
May it be so.
Me too.
Me three! ✌🏼
It's always been in the shadows from the beginning of this country. Democracy is a living thing and it needs to be fed or it will starve and turn on its people.
nd the problem is that democracy has been feeding on big money for a long time. We’ve all seen it. We’ve all experienced it. It is not solely a Republican issue. Everyone in politics is feeding on money and it is disgusting. It’s bringing down our democracy. If we win this election and can hold onto our win, we need immediate guard rails in place that we all thought were there all these years. We need campaign finance reform. We need money out of politics. It is ruining the country to have so much money involved. And I’m looking at you DNC who has been asking me for cash daily in every form that you can send the request multiple times a day.
Dana, you are saying some things that I have been dwelling on. Campaign finance reform has been a major concern of mine for some time. The amount of money being spent on this election is obscene. We could have solved the housing crisis and childhood hunger with that amount of money. I also think campaigns should be shorter like in other countries. Look at how quickly Kamala Harris has gotten her message across. We need to overturn Citizens United but that will take hard work that every voter needs to be aware of when voting for down ballot candidates. Without a blue senate and house progress will be hard won if not impossible.
I'm so frustrated with this. For every message asking for money I block 2 or 3 more show up. Sending money is one of the few things I can do to help the Democrats win, but that money is used to bombard us with ads, which we all hate.
Now the need for money is used to target ads at "low information voters" who are still undecided. I can't believe we're going to be relying on this group to be the deciding votes for if we will be losing our democracy or not. The people who are paying the least attention are holding all the cards?!?
A woman wrote recently that she had studied statistics and that poll workers know exactly how to get the results they want. Sure makes sense since the media is flooded daily with polls and most of us know no one who has been polled.
I took a statistics class in college and quickly realized that they could be used to support or discredit anything one wanted them to.
Morning, Lynell. Standing shoulder to shoulder with you on the other side of the country.
Thanks for this, as always! It's worth mentioning that when Thompson commented that she was hearing Hitler's words in America, no one (or almost no one) knew that Hitler's words _came from_ the United States, where the language, laws, and concepts of Black slavery were born. As Isabel Wilkerson, among others, has so clearly documented, the Nazis borrowed the racist playbook of the U.S., but they found it too draconian even for them, and modified the "one drop rule" before unleashing it on Germany.
Adolph Hitler started formulating his Theories of Racial Superiority by watching 1920s Westerns... The Indigenous are depicted as Ignorant Savages... I sometimes watch Old John Wayne Movies, and am aghast at the Depictions of the Indigenous... 21st Century Reality? The Indigenous have the highest Participation Rate of any Ethnic Group in the American Military... Notably, 1/4 of the 'Trigger-Pullers', the People-That-Matter, in the Elite SOCOM/JSOC Units are Indigenous...
& Hitler and Nazi lawyer Carl Schmidt sent German lawyers to study at southern law schools. The assignment? Study the legalese of Jim Crow, segregation, racial intimidation.
We trained our own Trojan horses. How very ironic. Or does our language have a word…
One to which I like to add a profane adjective before uttering.
Unreal in the long run. History does indeed provide some incredible hindsight
Traitors.
Good start
& manifest destiny (Leibenstrom). & Native American genocide.
It’s “lebensraum”, literally “living room”=German expansionism.
Ted-the history you’ve mentioned is what Americans need to reckon with-then maybe we can truly make progress toward the ideals of freedom, justice and equality.
I think it needs to be taught in junior high American History. Every culture has myths that it passes down from generation to generation. Our myth is those words, “We the people…” they really meant just wealthy white Protestant men from Northwest European origin. Everyone else was outside the rule of law until 1964.
The Peoples History- Zinn
How the South Won the Civil War- Richardson
II hate to say it but what goes around, comes around. If we don’t break this vicious circle now, we’ll be in for a world of hurt.
Shocked me to my bones
Chilling indeed! The problem, however, is that those of us in the choir have been singing this song from HCR’s sheet music for quite some time while those who need to hear the message are singing a different, discordant tune.
It Darkly Humors Me That 'Cadet-Bone-Spurs' Revels In Exhorting His Minions To Violence... It seems that DJT's Enthalls his Masses... DJT is a Fake Tough-Guy... He should be Tried, Sentenced, and Imprisoned for Sedition, and Treason....
He should be put in the ring with that American eagle that was on his desk for a photo op some years ago….that should straighten out the “pecking order” properly. 🦅🇺🇸
Love this
Kelly, In my view, your comment amplifies the importance these next two weeks for as much conversation as we possibly can muster, be it through phone banking and/or canvassing in battleground states (for residents of safe states, those states closest to home), expressly with right-leaning Independents and “soft” Republicans. I would add I sense Harris’s and Cheney’s three appearances in Wisconsin on Monday to be a great source for talking points.
Barbara – I quite agree. FDR was president when I was born, and I managed to survive Nixon, Reagan, and W. I never thought any of them would look good compared to Trump. And even Trump I seems to pale in comparison to the promises of a possible Trump II. Your advice on actions for the next two weeks is excellent. We all need to crank up our efforts.
Kelly, Thank you for writing. I would note, though not originating with me, every time I hear the phrase “margin of error” I think “margin of effort.” As for a second Trump term, given his intent to instate only loyalists combined with the Court granting him absolute immunity for “official acts,” contrary to his first term, there’d be no guardrails. Hence, with Project 2025 as a guide, we have an opportunity to portray the indescribable forms of agony and anguish that would be unleashed were Trump to be re-elected.
We need to fold into our thinking the fact that Trump is the Trojan horse and Vance is the attack force. Does anyone really think that Trump will even make it to January 6th? He's falling apart folks, mentally and probably physically apart from his fake doctors report. Vance and Thiel and Musk are the biggest bank rollers of anyone who will follow their orders and their direction. We've got to defeat one force after
another. First let's vote Trump out which means Vance too. And vote deep Democrat all the way down the ticket, that's quite obvious.
Crank it up. https://www.mobilize.us/events/phone-bank-volunteer-opportunities/
Yes.
Kelly, the music metaphor makes me smile -- even while my head and heart hurt. Thank you.
Thank you. Let’s hope we’re singing a joyful song two weeks from now!
... and are interested in hearing only entirely different music 🤢
Kelly, if I could still march, I'd be carrying my sousaphone and playing things like "three blind mice", the "ompa-loopa" theme from "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" or the "Imperial Death March" as they held their rallys. It is hard to defend oneself when wrapped in 37 pounds of brass, and I have to carry off hand, but I'd do it.
Spot on, Kelly.
“My offense was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man, after all. That is a crime against the reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to save the German people….”
Reading that quote gave me chills.
Same with me.
Hitler hardly measured up to the Nazi ideal of a “superior” being. Sadly, it is sometimes the more ordinary looking people who do horrible things against their fellow humans.
Yes, Heather, we have a Nazi in our midst. " “But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son," so to describe Mr. Trump. Mary Trump has been telling us, it is time the major media stand up and listen, otherwise they will be gone. Now is the time to rise up against Mr. Trump.
The problem is, however, that we do not have just one Nazi, but many and all are extremely filthy dirty wealthy people in and around Congress. Our history has shown that America harbored Nazis. My father was already in this country when the gathering at Madisen Square Garden occurred. My mom was en route from London where she took refuge after fleeing Germany. MY maternal grandparents were not so lucky as they perished in 1942 at the gas camp called Chelmno. Neither parent ever discussed the Madisen Square Garden incident with my sister nor I, ever. In my heart of hearts, I honestly believe that Stephen Miller reads Mein Kampf to Trump, out loud. It is Miller who is a Jewish Nazi.
I am so sorry to hear what happened to your maternal grandparents, Marlene. You have long been a voice of human dignity on this blog, and while it may not be my place to say, I suspect your grandparents would be proud of you.
Thank you, Daniel.
Sadly, yes. During law school, I was a clerk for an assistant AG for the state of Michigan, and he was one of the finest people I have ever known. He came to the U.S. as a boy, and served in the U.S. Army as a translator for American officers interrogating Nazi officials. His own parents were deported and murdered at Chelmno. He never told me that himself, but I learned it from his secretary.
Marlene, you have my utmost sympathy for the loss of your grandparents in such a horrible manner.
I think you nailed it: "I honestly believe that Stephen Miller reads Mein Kampf to Trump, out loud. It is Miller who is a Jewish Nazi.''
There were many "Jewish" Nazis. They were collaborators with Hitler and his minions who willingly helped round up people in the ghettos, helped get them to Auschwitz and Birkenau, and helped herd them into the ovens. At the very end many of them were imprisoned themselves despite their support of the regime and they too were gassed. Hitler had little patience or sympathy for Jews.
I expect the same from Trump, even as he has a Jewish son in law and his daughter converted. Stephen Miller probably should be looking over his shoulder constantly, no matter his support for Trump.
I have a question, Jon. How can these people both "hate the Jews" with every fiber of their being and yet support Israel as they try and destroy Gaza and thereby the Palestinian's? Does it reflect their belief in the "end times"?
Ally, I think they support the Christians there, not necessarily the Jews. However…Israelis have provided Europe with the finest food in the regions. They cannot eat pork but they export high quality meats because they are rich in agriculture. They do raise pigs for slaughter. Science and medicine are foremost in Israel. Many of our meds come from there. Netanyahu is Israel’s Trump. Most Israelis despise him and while the IDF killed Sinwar, the architect of the Hamas invasion, Bibi gets the credit, unfortunately. The extremism in the West Bank is because there are Ultra Orthodox Jews who invaded that area. They are also aligned with Bibi’s Likud Party. They are sickening and much like the MAGATS we are dealing with. Israelis want to live in peace with the Arab nations but the predominately male powers that be, won’t let that happen. The Palestinians deserve their own government and country. They don’t deserve the deviousness of being dominated by those who want to disrupt their lives. No one does.
Bibi Netanyahu is the Jewish Version of a "Christian Nationalist". It is like comparing Marjorie Taylor Greene to Daniel Berrigsn (the Jesuit priest who advocated against the Vietnam War often on the basis of Christian beliefs). Greene demonstrates such an utter lack of understanding of anything that would be considered truly "Christian" just as Netanyahu seems to have no connection anymore to the reasons a Jewish nation even exists (to provide a place for the few millions of European Jews left after the Holocaust).
So the support of Israel from the far right is much less (if at all) in support of "religion" as it is in support of some of the objectives of far right extremism, i.e. the suppression of Islamic countries. I am personally not thrilled by most serious Islamic countries either but never to the point that I support going to war against them.
Not just in Congress, Marlene. Nazis have also infiltrated state legislatures. Here in Fla, Desantis is Mussolini to Trump’s Hitler. We have Project 2025 being put into action, we have a “state guard” of brown shirts who answer only to Desantis, and there is an unspoken threat to anyone who dares disagree with Desantis. I’m going to stay with my kids for a few days around the election, because I do believe the threat of violence is real.
Jen, DeSantis is a frigging nightmare for Florida. The sooner he goes, the better. I know what’s going on FLA because I have friends there and they abhor him. I have heard about his guards harassing older women. What a pig he is!
Truly! He’s a pompous jerk who, along with his supermajority, changed the Constitution in Fla so he could run for President while governor. My guess? Either a change again so he can try to remain in office in Fla past his two term limit, or another attempt at the Oval. He’s smarter-he knows what he is doing and is INTENTIONALLY cruel to migrants, lgbtq, folks suffering from hurricanes again and again and again, and anyone who doesn’t agree with him. A truly repugnant human in every way-and clearly reps the MAGA nazi minions the former Republican party has become.
Except for the “intellectual” part, it really does describe Trump to a tee. The “intellectual” part comes with JD Vance, Project 2025, and the Heritage Foundation with a lot of Federalist Society thrown in. It’s horrifying to read what Thompson wrote and to realize that we’re witnessing the same playbook all over again. VOTE BLUE!!!
And don’t forget, Thiel funded Vance!
Cast your mind forward. Votes have been cast. Counting has started and majorities are recorded voting for Harris/Walz. Mr Trump refuses to accept that. People representing Mr Trump appear at the polling places and destroy evidence, claiming that all those votes are illegal a Mr Trump is the winner. Instantly, Those of Trumps party begin taking military control. At this point, the current government intervenes. And then.., This seems a more and more likely scenario. Are there pla sin pl e to respond to this next step, which follows history and can be expected?!?
You imply civil war. I fear we are in a much too modern and "civilized" society for that to actually happen here. And the strength of a military like the US has would be hard to overcome with a civilian rebel militia. They have the big guns. Mostly, at best, we have rocks and pitch forks.
I disagree. I think it’s damn well possible that this could flare up into a civil war. And the ugliness of it will depend on who will start the riots. If it’s the MAGAts coming “to the rescue”, it could get pretty ugly: remember that these people find it completely normal to stack up on full-automatic assault rifles - for “self-defense” of course…
I agree Mike. I have an older brother who is an ex-Green Beret. He is right here in sunny, happy go lucky, California. He lives among us as a wanna be fascist. Years ago, he told me that Tucker Carlson should be the only journalist for Americans to listen to. My head exploded!!!
I was aghast.
I now see his coded IG posts. There are plans afoot and no one is safe. The MAGA orcs are among us all, everywhere, and they can’t wait to unleash their fury at our “liberal mindset.” They see a Führer Vance in the near future. They cannot let democracy win now. They are too close and powerful to ending it all now and will do everything in their power to take it from the rest of us.
That's exactly what I meant. And none of us here can wrap our head around this. None of us in Heather's community can understand how people can desire war so much, and long so much to kill other people in the most bloody and painful way possible, "because they deserve it". As much as we loathe the MAGAts, none of us here is actually longing to go out in the streets with a machine gun and kill them one by one. The MAGAts, however, are very much willing to do so. And that's what I mean by "never underestimate your enemy": never underestimate the seething hate these people have for us "snowflake pc libtards"...
Creative minds can adapt, never fear, horror is possible in a “civilized” society.
Yes there are quite a lot of plans in place all over the country that have been in process for many months. There was a review by Joyce Vance (one of her five questions features) of a lawyer who is handling all that and reports good progress of legal, police, sheriffs etc. groups (besides Marc Elias and the thousands of lawyers) preparing
in many ways.
Well I have been on this Substack saying this over and over but screaming about the horrors of the mainstream media as one of the enemies, and isolating them from our opinions doesn't exactly work the way you would want it to work. Supporting them, urging then to write the appropriate stories doesn't guarantee success but I do believe it has a lot better chance then making them our enemies.
As long s MSM has a ad-based/shareholder-profit business model, we will get the drivel infortainment they put out. They are beholden to shareholders. Not democracy. We are fools to bang our heads on the wall whailing about the “Fourth-Estate”. That went the way of the Fairness Doctrine. Some reporters do try to deliver the information we need. But, as humans, they need to pay their rent and mortgages too. And when your work must first pass an editor whose eye is on shareholder-value, good luck being the Beacon-of-Truth. This reality frustrates many of us. It leads many to conclude that the whole of MSM has autocratic tendencies. And others to slap back that their frustration as based on ignorance. We are all trying to work out in real time the Info War we are in. The fog is thick, manufactured, and meant to disorient, frustrate, and divide us. Heather Cox Richardson on substack has been my Fourth-Estate.
Exactly! I haven’t read a newspaper or watched any network news in about 2 years. Most of my news, info., etc. comes from HCR and others on Substack. I do watch some political speeches, the DNC national convention, and I’m very well aware of what’s going on. It may appear that I’ve got my head in the sand, but just ask my family and friends how politically aware I am! I’m 77 years old and sure don’t want to live what is left to me on this earth under a Fascist regime. I fear greatly for my grandson.
Sad to have to point this out but that "isolationism" (thinking that Heather's column is somehow a replacement for mainstream media) is just as myopic and dangerous (as a threat to liberal society) as the right wing MAGA embrace of Fox News. Do yourselves a favor and start looking at some of the best MSM like the NYT, maybe you would at least become a little more open minded about things. This is how isolation occurs, by self isolation from multiple points of view and by ignoring unbiased sources. Writing off the best of the MSM will be another of the nails in our own coffins.
IMHO, one issue is that the MSM is so siloed nowadays. Some ARE coming around and reporting accurately, while some are slow on the uptake or not showing alarm at all (it’s a 5-alarm as far as I’m concerned).
I would agree that MSM is often siloed. My complaint here has never been that there aren't biased components of the mainstream media, but that to suggest that they are ALL against us is nonsensical. And certainly the idea that many do not recognize the potential dangers early enough is in and of itself dangerous. But to turn them into enemies will do more harm than good. .
The countdown has started…
Having German family and genes I always wondered (somewhat ashamedly, though my German grandfather fought the Nazis in WW2) how could a brilliant, enlightened people be turned to such dark cruelty and hate? I hope we don’t keep going down this path, but increasingly I see how a relatively good, brilliant, energetic country like ours can be sabotaged and twisted against itself. That being said, as we desperately fight for what’s right within this country, perhaps you too need a little rebalancing?
Breathe. Exercise. Channel the parasympathetic nervous system that is also being trashed in our bodies by this constant outrage:
https://mccormickmd.substack.com/p/a-parasympathetic-panacea-via-our
Goodnight 😴 Recharge for the good struggle again tomorrow.
I’m here because my grandfather emigrated to the US before 1900. I never met him. His character was totally above reproach. He became a citizen, married my wonderful grandmother and had my mom and her brother. He settled in Las Vegas, NM and became a respected member of the community. He left behind seven siblings in Germany and some became Hitler’s victims. I truly believe that the loss of so much family broke his heart as he passed away in 1945.
The grief is passed on, but some forget. Some don’t
Yes the grief ripples through generations after, with doing family genealogy, even though my grandfather came over just before the Civil War, he left a very large family behind. I now know of at least 13 cousins who perished in five of the camps.
From the little I know of world history, I suspect that there are few societies free of sociopathic episodes. There seems to be an "evil" side to human nature that we are fools not to recognize as part of human nature, and preemptively discourage. Demagogues have prospered for centuries by calling this forward in the angry and unselfaware, vending phony flattery of "master race", etc. Do we not detect regretted episodes and abiding flickers of selfishness in our own character? I suspect that humility walks side by side with compassion.
I come from a similar background. I remember with fine German Army officers in Afghanistan who expressed shame about the Nazis. Being a diplomat, I said, sincerely, that had I been a live in 1900, I would have viewed 'Germania' (i.e., Germany, Austria, and Northern Switzerland), I would have viewed Germany as the greatest civilization on Earth in terms of science, the arts, philosophy. One thing for sure, I would never have anticipated the havoc and harm that Germany would bring before 1950.
P.S., there is literature out there, however, showing the under-currents of anti-Semitism rising to a fever pitch long before the dark-stars aligned for the Nazis. "Hitler's Willing Executioners" by Dr Daniel Jonah Goldhagen comes to mind. Ironically it was best-seller in Germany before I had heard of it. A German colleague in N.Y.C. recommended it to me.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/06/worse-than-war-daniel-goldhagen
P.P.S., Important essay by Joyce Vance; tucked inside it is an arresting and inspiring profile of courage. Such normally unseen displays of principle over preference -- of the means sullying or ennobling the ends -- need more air-time. https://joycevance.substack.com/p/first-amendment-rights-for-everyone
It helps to consider your body as its own life form to be listened to and attended to and not just some kind of apparatus that you live in. As a trigger point myotherapist I can attest to significant progress to be had by helping people understand the vitality of our existence being essentially regulated by what we do and what we know about self-care.
Thanks for sharing this here, Doc.
I shared that post a couple days ago with my psychologist wife. She's already using it with some of her clients.
Heather always finds a chapter in history that beautifully overlays current events, making it impossible to miss the comparison. It is shocking to see what appears to be a close race when the choices seem so disparate for some of us.
The division between the pro-Trump and never-Trump factions is vast and perplexing. I hope that the poll data is as far off the mark as it was in the previous two elections, and the inscrutable undecided voters show up for Harris and turn this nail-biter into a landslide. If I wish hard enough, maybe it will come to be.
I think you are seriously misreading the polling history from 2020. The poll data in 2020 was far off the mark in that they predicted a 10+% blowout by Biden and Trump beat their predictions by 3-4%. Still not enough to win in 2020 thankfully but the polls are closer in 2024. So if 2020 repeats that foreshadows a close Trump victory.
I do understand the 2020 polling data as much as it can be understood. It had the largest error in over 40 years of polling. The 22 midterms polling was fairly accurate, although there were many partisan polls that skewed toward Trump but were shown to be erroneous by the actual results. There have been some significant changes in polling methods in 2024 - larger polling organizations have broadened their polling methods to include online, written and telephone data instead of telephone only. There are also many more polling organizations with many of them highly partisan, which could skew the actual results considerably. It's hard to draw and solid conclusions from the polling results.
Great points. I think we all just need to keep working and (if you believe in that sort of thing, praying). It will be very very close.
Expect Nate Cohn at the NYT to continue running his curated "polling" horror story right down to the wire at which point Harris v Trump will be a tie or maybe Trump will be proclaimed up by a point. Cohn will continue to manipulate the daily results by including Trump biased polls and ignoring polls that show Kamala up by 3-5 points.........
While terrifying Liberals, Cohn and his polling staff are publishing self doubting articles explaining that polls can frequently be wrong, sometimes beyond the margin of error. WOW! Who knew???.......
Please, please, ignore the daily polls. Pollsters simply can't reach too many voting groups that will decide the election. Cohn is just fabricating results to sell newspapers.....
Meanwhile, the Times adheres to it's "centrist" political view, regardless of the threat from Trump. The paper has so lost its soul, my recommendation to the Times would be....
Stop trying to publish the news and change your moniker to "All the recipes and word games fit to print". The paper would have a better shot at the truth.
There's a well-known quote attributed to Sinclair Lewis, "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the Flag and carrying a Bible."
And I pray daily for the safety of my co-religionists in Iran, the Baha'is, who are living (and dying) under conditions we might see in a Christian Nationalist America.
As a Baha'i also, I say the prayer for America and pray for our fellow believers in Iran and elsewhere. I had always thought I was "safe" to practice my Faith and now fear it will be taken away.
As a Christian, I believe you should have the right to practice whatever faith you follow or even no faith. The Founders were wise to establish separation of religion and state. I can’t stand Christian Nationalism, because to me it’s a direct descendant of slaveholder Christianity and misuses religious belief as an excuse for a power grab to engage in political dominance. It also tends to make people hostile toward religion in general. The Christian Nationalists think their political and social dominance of the nation should continue forever. It would be a nightmare for everyone else.
I think the original was "...carrying a cross", but the meaning is the same. Christian Nationalism writ large.
So timely. Spread this essay far and wide on social media.
I have touted “It Can’t Happen Here” by Sinclair Lewis for the past several years. Way back in 1935, he saw and foretold the danger of the Nazis and how easily the same tragedy could unfold in America. The plot unfolds in rural Vermont as the fascists begin to take hold of power and expel FDR from the presidency. It becomes increasingly ugly and scary. Reading it in today's super-charged political atmosphere, you cannot help but be amazed at the similarities between what Lewis saw in contemporary Germany and possibly happening here, too, and the stated plans of Trump and his MAGA fanatics.
Please get a copy of this book immediately and read it now; you will be glad you did.
I read it shortly after the 2016 election. Shattering.
I’ve said so many times that Trump is the modern day Hitler in his words, deeds, composure and character. To threaten our fellow Americans in the manner he does is exactly reminiscent of the 1930’s. This is not the America I grew up in. We cannot let him into office again. All Americans need to be educated about what we’re in for if he succeeds.
Richard I don't know how old you are, I am 73, but the America I grew up in was a racist country that denigrated anyone of color, black, brown or yellow, that hated anyone who wasn't Christian and that included not only atheists like myself and family, Moslems, Hindus but even Catholics for quite a while (at least until the election of JFK), and cherished only one thing... money. So I would say this probably IS the America you grew up in, only on steroids. I wish it weren't so but it seems like we are just repeating everything that had happened before.
Just the guns are more dangerous.
Agreed, and thank you for your comments which are spot on. This all coalesced for me when l read Rachel Madow’s “Prequel” and said to myself: The book is so aptly named, and OMG, it’s happening again. I heartily recommend it to all. By the way, I just turned 80 and hope our world isn’t slipping away from reality.
I was just beginning to feel a bit less stressed but am now frightened beyond measure.
I am afraid as well. I am embarking on a seven swing state GOTV campaign to use kind words on water bottle stickers to subtly influence good people to vote. The stickers say “VOTE, you make the difference.” They have joyful nonpartisan colors.
The fascist tactics being used are meant to disaffect voters. We need to counter these attempts. It is not too late, many intermittent voters are not giving this election much attention. Their reasoning is not as important as their vote. If good people stay home, we lose not just the election but a way of life.
Here we go . I have no bone in my body that could ever consider joining a fascist group. Not ever. I’m not afraid of them or for my fate in that regard. I voted straight BLUE today . That part is done. We shall see if America is buying the fascism or staying the course in about 15-16 days. If the outcome is for the worst then I know my life is likely considerably shorter but I will not be silenced . Not by trump not by his ilk. Not without an ugly fight. But fight I will and I will speak truth to power while I live. Yes it’s hard to imagine America being as bad as 1930’s Germany but it did happen. Who knows . They didn’t have the internet and that still may be a game changer even if it’s largely a disappointing wasteland right now .
We have politicians banning books, one saying “ some folks need killing”, we all know what trump says and many republicans are already goose stepping behind him. I’m sure he owns a copy of Mein kampf ,if not a signed one. Republicans have been pretty successful getting America to this point . Worry is legitimate.