Some of the presentation has slipped from my mind, including the names of the lecturers. I have done a good bit of digging, but cannot rediscover their names. The event was close to 45 years ago, so it’s not likely now that I can find more details. But the general conclusions that I heard that night were so striking that I can recall them clearly. Here, briefly, are the salient points the futurists made:

Several factors and trends will reach a critical point together in about the year 2015, the lecturers said, and that confluence will cause a great deal of tumult and disorder in the U.S. (I recall the year specifically and clearly.) Two of the elements that would cause the crisis stand out in my memory. One was racism and racial tension and the other was the move of our economy away from manufacturing as new technology necessitated a big shift in the nature of our work force.

I have thought a great deal about that night in the Ag Auditorium and have examined and reexamined my memories of it. I wish I could remember more. What I have outlined above are the pieces of the presentation that stuck in my mind, and you can see why the presenters now seem prescient to me. Those two factors clearly have been highly impactful, even determinative, in the trump/extremist era. There is much more to it, but if both of those elements were removed or were less severe, events since 2015 almost certainly would have proceeded in a less toxic manner.

In researching this topic, I have found a few names of futurists who were on the lecture circuit back then. Some of them had predictions concerning the 21st century that were quite rosy and did not feature any occurrences like the crisis we now are in. That makes me even more eager to try to discover who those two guys were. If you have any leads, please let me know.

I strongly believe that the intense underlying theme of racism has been the single most impactful bane of our existence as a nation, but it also seems to me that racism now is less widespread and virulent that it was when I was a young guy, but that doesn’t mean it no longer is a strong factor in our current difficulties. My Pollyanna side suggests this may be a last long gasp before racism starts a lengthy fade into irrelevance. One thing, though, is certain: It won’t go quietly or quickly and if it finally is to leave us in peace, we will have to usher it out with a strong and determined push.

Economic change always is a challenge, but the anodynes are good governance and a genuine concern to help and to protect our work force from shifting economic currents as best we can. When we have in place a government and a cabal of billionaire tech bros that are determined instead to exacerbate the effects of change, bad things happen.

As Democrats come together to work to win in November, most of our candidates are addressing both these factors, and that is as it should be. Finally, too, much of America now is open to the argument that we must come together and stop allowing ourselves to be divided by the forces that gin up racism and that we also must rein in the billionaires.

Shoulda got the message in ’82, right?

(P.S. It helps if you click “Like” and “Restack.” Thanks!)

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Polls and actual results of elections during 2025 and 2026 so far clearly point to big wins for Democrats and progressives in November. Our small dollars come from so many individual donors that the totals keep us competitive with the PAC’s and billionaires. (Citizens who contribute $$$ to campaigns are highly likely to vote for those to whom they contributed!) The mood of the electorate in light of the broad and abject failures of trump and the extremists in virtually every aspect of governance and economics is manifestly hostile to the anti-democratic policies of the current regime.

Panic and desperation in the face of rejection by voters has led the regime and its minority of venal extremist supporters to plot to jigger the midterm elections in any way they can. Their plans are not secret and are being contested in courts around the country. The master plan of suppression depends largely upon an attempt to erase as many Democratic voters as possible from the state voter rolls. With the exception of several very red states, the opposition in state legislatures and attorneys general offices has been strong, determined, and effective. The lines have been drawn and the battles will be fought right up to and beyond election day.

To defeat the regime requires that we continue to expose and loudly oppose their plots at all levels, but especially at the state and local levels. The Supreme Court’s six extremist judges are taking treasonous stands regularly, but their reach is limited. Please keep in mind that under our federal system, states are sovereign and possess a great deal of political and legislative power.

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Somehow the essential nature of this struggle seems to have escaped many Americans. This clearly is a class war, the very rich against the rest of us. Our nation seldom has been able to recognize that kind of aggression easily because the wealthy have had the cash that enables them to disguise it. Their fallback positions have been to accuse anyone on the side of the people of being socialists or communists. Now, those positions appear ragged and less effective because the lies have been told too often and are transparently untrue. Also, Americans seem now to have a taste for a bit of socialism, such as Social Security, Medicare for All, tax-paid child care services, etc. When those common sense programs are paid for by taxation of everyone, including the obscenely wealthy, the results are good for all of us and for democracy itself, and that is something the rich absolutely abhor!

The overarching goal of our rich, epstein opponents is to deconstruct democracy in the U.S. and to steal every penny and every good thing for themselves. Corruption among the regime’s extremists and their billionaire supporters has reached breathtaking levels and is so over-the-top that many people just cannot wrap their heads around it. This den of thieves cares nothing for the citizens of the nation, including their own supporters, and actively is trying to kill us. That is not an exaggeration; the tech bros, especially, believe that they just don’t need us, hoi polloi. Their on-going efforts to destroy our already limping health care system alone demonstrate their murderous intentions.

As they destroy our economy, eliminate social programs, and feed the rate of inflation, they will make it ever more difficult for many of us even to feed ourselves. The plotters actively support and encourage eugenics-based thinking, regarding themselves as being of superior stock while the rest of us are inferior and expendable.

Trump and his supporters have undermined our egalitarian, inclusive democracy, but they have not been able to deliver a fatal blow, and they will not succeed in destroying our free society. The next several months likely will be difficult economically for many of us. Trump’s tariffs, the thievery and corruption of his regime, the drive to fill the countryside with data centers, and the major disaster that is his war on Iran will cause more job losses, and prices will continue to rise. The strait at the southeastern end of the Suez Canal is the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and now the Houthis, who are allies of Iran, are blockading it. That, along with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz by the Iranians will cause the prices of oil, gas, diesel, fertilizer, and pretty much everything else to continue to rise. During this (apparently) forever war, the only time the price of oil declines is when trump tells some lie about how we’re about to achieve total victory or some excellent new negotiations are about to begin. As soon as the lies don’t pan out, back up goes the price of oil and its derivatives.

Trump’s insane “policies” have created a perfect economic storm in which prices will rise on virtually every product in our economy. (Don’t forget effects of the “new” tariff regime.) This won’t be a straight-line change; prices will bump up and down to some degree, but the trend line will be up. Some of the effects of the new tariffs and events in the Middle East will arrive slowly and one bit at a time, but the biggest effects likely will come within the next 90 days.

None of these economic disasters is good news, but they will have one beneficial knock-on effect, one that we already are seeing in the polls. Voters are both dismayed and angry and even maga is beginning slowly to shift toward Democrats or to give up the idea of voting altogether. When election day arrives on 3 November, we now know it is highly likely we’ll see the Blue Tsunami for which we all are hoping.

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However, that outcome is not guaranteed and we have specific tasks we must accomplish that are essential. First, with regard to voting itself: make plans now to vote as early as possible. Early voting has several positive effects. When others see and hear of a high level of early voting, they are encouraged to vote. When we vote early, those who are working so hard to turn out the vote can remove us from their lists and focus on other people who perhaps are not as likely to vote. Early voting reduces the lines on voting day and makes it harder for the extremists to intimidate or otherwise influence people not to vote because their targets are dispersed and harder to find.

One key point is that a huge turnout for the elections is very important. If we can do what Hungary did and get record numbers to the polls, the cheating that trump and the extremists are trying to do will fall flat, as such cheating did in Hungary.

We must continue the steady flow of small contributions many of us are making. The earlier we give the better, but continuing to give right up to Election Day is very important too. We also can have a huge effect when we call our representatives and senators, both state and national, to express our opposition to voter suppression. The effect of many voices is enormous, and if we continue to make noise the other side is discouraged, which is a good thing.

There is some concern that Democrats are too engaged in in-fighting now. What else is new? Centrists and progressives of various stripes are engaged in a struggle to control the party narrative. During primaries, that is OK. That’s what primaries are for, to decide such issues. The key part, though, is that once the primaries all are over, we must come together and elect the Democratic nominees. After we’re in office, we still must litigate our position on the political spectrum, but that logically and effectively can and should be done by severally debating and deciding the nature of specific bills, laws, and actions of the legislature. The single biggest question in all that will be whether we put money in its proper place in our society. The wealthy will do everything they can to stop actions that, for example, tax the wealthy. The solutions won’t come quickly or easily, but we can cobble reform together only if we take power back beginning on 3 November.

Showing up when demonstrations and protests are organized is another way our individual voices can be amplified into an extraordinarily loud shout. The cumulative effects of on-going demonstrations can be decisive. When we make it clear that the American people are determinedly opposed to this current regime, we discourage the other side and encourage supporters of democracy to become more active and to vote.

In an upcoming post, I will focus upon what must be done now and, especially, in January in the expectation that we will have control of both the House and the Senate after the election. We cannot begin that planning after we win; it must begin now or we’ll miss a great opportunity to hit the ground running. We all have some notions about what we can accomplish, but those ideas must be organized into specific proposals that are polished, organized, and put into action at the very first opportunity. If we’re to secure our democracy, there isn’t a moment to lose! The American people will not tolerate any lengthy or ineffective period of inactivity from our side if and when we reacquire power. We must deliver significant change quickly!!

It feels as though we largely are marching in step and in solidarity. The wind — the sentiments of the people of our nation — is at our backs. Let’s continue our challenging and important work and push ever harder until we have rescued our egalitarian, inclusive democracy.

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Another factor in thinking about how maga sees things, is that most of American history is opaque to them. That saw about “you didn’t pay attention in history class, did you?” applies here. As weakened as the teaching of public school history may be now, even students who engage with it do not seem to come away with a complete or accurate picture of some parts of our backstory. (Slavery and racism rank at the top of the list of elements not taught factually.)

1929

With the caveat that ardent maga people now represent only a quarter — give or take — of the adult population, there is a cohesive and solid group among us who believe every trump lie and consider him the greatest president ever. His lies and misbehaviors, maga believes, are only ploys to destroy the elite radical left who victimize true Americans and pander to Black and Brown people. Yes, it’s a cult, but its defiant immunity to objective truths makes it still a force with which we must reckon.

Most of our elections are decided by relatively narrow margins. So, that small-seeming quarter can be decisive if we do not produce the turnout needed to offset their impact.

1940

We could spend many hours debating how to reach those maga minds with more accurate information and truthful reasoning. It is extraordinarily frustrating that they got the first part right, that there is a cabal of the elite that seek to take control and subvert American democracy, but misidentified that elite group so grotesquely that they see trump and his allies as the solution when in fact they are the very “elite” maga should be vilifying. After all, maga “reasons” trump is “tearing things down” and going after the bastards who look down on working class people.

Does any of this make sense? It surely does when we factor in the ardent propaganda work of Fox and other American outlets along with the work of Russian digital propagandists and add in the work of one other group. I hardly know now what to call the so-called Christians who teach such hate and promote violence, but “Christian nationalists” seems too mild. A large majority of maga are ardent believers and hear as much propaganda in their churches as they do on the TV and radio outlets that cater to them. All these information sources form the maga info-bubble.

1947

Woe to us if we do not recognize the importance of the minority that is contained in that bubble. They will vote against what seem to be their own self-interests again and again. In the long run, should their candidates win, they will suffer from the outcome. The billionaires will suck every dollar possible from them — and the rest of us — by keeping their wages low; destroying public education; denying them healthcare, Social Security, and every form of proper government support for all citizens. But, like medieval peasants, they will persist in believing their worldly suffering will just lead to an eternity of heavenly delights. Meanwhile, in close elections, their votes may be decisive.

How then should we deal with maga? They are Americans and deserving of our consideration despite the great frustration that comes from talking with them or listening to their propaganda. It is easy and tempting to denigrate them, but that’s a temptation we must resist. Our goals must be to limit the damage they do and to understand that bringing them back into the fold is the ultimate goal. No good outcome in this endeavor will occur really soon. Maga will be with us for a very long time to come, but with diminishing influence. Our chief tools must be conversation, factual information, patience, and the hard work of standing determinedly against their ploys in public. Despite our recognition of their membership in our polity, we cannot give them an inch as they try to undermine our rights and gratuitously harm Black and Brown people and other vulnerable groups. Not a very palatable or pleasant prospect, but, I suggest, the right one.

2026

In combatting the extremists and their maga supporters we must employ an accurate knowledge of our history and an eagerness to teach it. (Thank you, HCR!) We must be well informed about what got us to this challenging and unpleasant pass. It is important that we know when to debate exactly what kinds of policies we support in the larger group of Democrats and Independents, and when we must put aside the debate and come together even if the union in that moment is imperfect. And, the ultimate task for ‘26 is to produce a level of voter turnout that makes the election outcomes impervious to attacks from the extremists and their $$$$! Hungary got 80%! We must try to exceed that!

The crux is that we have a major job of work to do and we cannot permit ourselves to flag even though this has been a long, hard fight! Our egalitarian, inclusive democracy is worth every drop of sweat!

At the bottom is a list of the negative factors that got us to this point. I’m eager to hear your comments. Let’s be sure we all understand why we find ourselves in this struggle. It’s not as though we haven’t done this before. The filthy rich have had us by the throat before! During the run up to the Civil War, during the 1890’s, in the 1920’s, and then during a long haul of 1980 to the present America’s rich have tried to subvert democracy in order to fill their own pockets. It’s one of the maladies that capitalist societies often face, and we must wonder what changes have to be made so we can jump off this destructive and frustrating carousel!

Now, back to work! We’ve practiced quite a lot and now we’re pretty sure we know how to win elections and influence people. Let’s do this job so thoroughly that we can take a nap after 3 November!

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____________________

Here’s the list of several elements the cabalists manipulated in order to divide, confuse, anger, and dispirit us as well as to steal from us. This isn’t an all-inclusive list; you’ll see here only the most obvious pieces. Each item deserves a lengthy discussion, which I have provided in a previous post.

1. The enormous wealth inequality that has been engineered into existence over the last eighty years. (Citizens United is both a manifestation and a tool of this inequality.) The contest between the understanding of economics of John Maynard Keynes, on the one hand, and the Milton Friedman school of thought that has promoted neoliberalism and trickle-down economics on the other hand. Keynes was right; Friedman was a partisan hack.

2. The ginning up of racism and other forms of anti-other fear and hatred. Racism is a powerful force among many Americans and it owes its influence in part to the efforts of the wealthy extremists to divide us. Black and Brown people suffer from this despicable attitude, as do immigrants, and so do LGBTQ+ and trans Americans.

3. America’s own anti-American propaganda (Fox, etc.) and Russia’s misinformation assault.

4. The campaign against America’s system of public education. This is a powerful and growing impediment to a truly egalitarian and inclusive democracy.

5. Lies about the climate crisis initiated by deep-pocketed fossil fuel interests. An existential crisis that hardly can be overstated.

6. Efforts to undermine our work in foreign affairs and our efforts to keep the peace. Abandonment of Ukraine. A downright stupid war on Iran.

7. False claims about our economy, followed by incompetent management of the levers of government that affect the economy. Abandonment of anti-trust laws.

8. Misogyny. The attacks on women’s rights are a major part of the radical agenda. Women are leaders in our efforts to protect democracy, and we owe them total support.

9. Abandonment of traditional and valid moral values — greed is good? — and a radical, self-serving mutation of traditional religion into a weaponized version of itself.

10. The “change factor.” America and the world have changed very rapidly during the last 100 years, and the rapidity and nature of that change have left many people feeling off-balance and concerned about the future. The effects of those rapid changes were exacerbated dramatically by the Covid crisis.

11. Growth of the epstein pedophile ring. It’s origins and purposes still are being plumbed, but it is probably much more widespread and important than we yet know. Identifying and prosecuting the obscenely rich men and women who were engaged in these activities is a major goal of reform. Providing relief and closure for the survivors is very important. Exposing whatever roles spies and the security agencies of major nations played in the matter also are extremely important.

12. Accountability. The perpetrators of many of the illegal and otherwise nefarious activities of the extremists have not yet been held accountable. Complete accountability is necessary to end the current crisis and to prevent a repeat of it. People must go to prison for what they have done.

There is little to say, now, about the reality of global warming. Little to say because only dramatic actions will mean anything. The Iran war supposedly has kicked many governments into moving faster toward renewables because now fossil fuels seem more unreliable and renewables are hitting lower and lower price levels.

The deadly heat wave in India that sparked action in The Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson in 2020 now seems rather passé, because the surge of fascism in the U.S. and the Russian genocidal war against Ukraine, and the genocide Israel is perpetrating in Gaza and Lebanon, and the Iran war all have dragged attention to other matters. Trump’s financial support comes in big part from fossil fuel interests, so he has doubled down on fossil fuels.

The one bright spot is that renewables now are mostly cheaper than fossil fuels. Oh, yeah, money speaks. So, even in our benighted U.S., the movement toward solar and wind rattles on, though it has taken mighty efforts in the courts to stymie the fascists’ efforts to stop those projects, at least for the moment.

For American citizens as individuals, these manifestations of the crisis are just one more element that should goad us to greater efforts. There seems to be a general notion in the country that “we’ll get ‘em in November.” Well, be that as it may — and right now chances seem very good — it seems more and more likely that the fascists, seeing the same numbers we see, are trying to seize power so firmly before the elections that they can control the outcome. It very well may be that the critical moment will be next week, or the third week of July, or sometime in August.

Finally, the single biggest factor now is that the heat and the political dangers should rouse all people around the world to action. Every thinking adult should be pulling on the same rope, but 21st century fascists are highly adept at manipulating the information sphere and keeping many out of the game in one way or another. Racism, digital propaganda, and religion — engaged through fear — are three of their most effective tools. We should understand that the billionaire/epstein class has us by the throat. Will we NOW get going?

In the end, the personal decisions of literally billions of humans will drive this era and determine our fate. Either we’ll overcome petty issues and considerations and look to the main chance to preserve our species and our freedoms, or we won’t. I’m betting we will, but it clearly is going to be a very difficult and closely run race!

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I expected higher prices because I have seen them going up, but today I realized that at the grocery I paid something like 55% to 60% more for what I bought than I did two or three months ago. And, yes, eggs were up again.

At the garden store I didn’t buy much, but the seeds I purchased cost me about $15.00, and last year they would have cost half that.

None of this is a surprise to you, I’m sure. But when we let that sink in, we have to wonder how low-wage workers, or even people with average-level incomes, are managing to get by, especially now that the extremists have cut every social support they had. For those income earners, this inflation and gouging — for there clearly is some of that too — isn’t an inconvenience; it has to be a disaster. Imagine having kids to feed now!

A gilded age “cottage” of the rich.

Democratic politicians — liberals in general — are talking about affordability, but they really are getting the message very wrong. As Michael Tomasky said today in his own Substack, this is a five-alarm fire. He was talking about the billionaire attack on all of us as well as the economy. Of course, the economy is part and parcel of the efforts of the rich to disenfranchise and impoverish us.

Those paragraphs above are so easy to write, but to get all Americans to understand that this is a real, exigent, deadly threat is far harder than getting our people to believe aliens are visiting Earth! Literally, very many folks find the fantasies about aliens more credible than they do the truth about the class war.

Every American is in this, regardless of whether she wants to be. United, we can end the oligarchy and the eugenics experiment of which the obscenely rich want us to be the subjects. Please, keep in mind that rich people are not special. Their intelligence levels follow the general averages of the whole population. Because they’re rich, they are totally self-absorbed. They are not any smarter than the rest of us but think only of themselves, and that combination makes them very dangerous.

So the message must be that candidates are expected to promise to take all those steps that will end this assault on the rest of us by the insanely rich. Tax higher incomes much, much more — 90%+ for the highest bracket — and tax wealth as well. Remove the Social Security tax cap! Eliminate truly stupid court decisions such as Citizens United. The justices were bribed to set those precedents! Install legal limits on campaign contributions! On and on; there are many steps to the process, but we all clearly see where we must go.

Most importantly, we must elect candidates who see this need very well and we must keep our voices and our activism loud and visible. People have the power, but only when we use it. Wishin’ and hopin’ won’t feed the bulldog.

We all gotta get busy!

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All those Substackers who are suggesting that you like and restack their work are correct. Your actions control the algorithms!

(I’m white, and I recognize my limitations in speaking about racism. The understanding Black Americans have of the racism we see in many White Americans goes far deeper than my own. My familiarity with racism is, nonetheless, broad and meaningful. The repugnance I feel for racists is deep and abiding, and my experiences with them lengthy and impactful. I never have understood the despicable racism we see in many Whites and I abhor it. I believe the roots of those attitudes lie largely in fear, ignorance, and lack of exposure to Black people.)

Even though America, from colonial days, has had a very wide and deep seam of racism running through it, that attitude has been diminishing, albeit too slowly, since WWII and the years when we passed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. Only a minority of Americans now fear minorities as they once did, and that minority consists mainly of people who live in places where they seldom come into daily contact with people of color. Since integration, many American kids have been going to schools in classrooms filled with students of many races, and that has created a degree of comfort and ease among our citizens that was passing rare prior to the 1960’s.

Remember that within the next ten or twelve years, Whites no longer will be a majority in this country. Nothing they are trying to do or can do will change that, though that fact doesn’t stop them from trying. Their efforts to force women to give birth are rooted in their panic to “catch up” so that Whites don’t become one of several minorities in the U.S. After about 2035, or 2040 at the very latest, 50%+ of Americans will not be White, and for the maga core, which is largely rural, that prospect is terrifying because of the propaganda assaults of the cabal. Remember that stuff about eating the dogs and cats? That’s the kind of probe the extremists have used for years to activate the fear of “others.”

The changes that have taken place in race relationships since WWII have been enormous. We cannot rest easy about racism because it still is a potent and downright evil factor in our nation, but let’s not overlook or diminish how matters have changed over the last eighty years. Some of us remember the protests, the marches, the sit-ins, the deaths, the dogs, the beatings — all the horrors and also all the successes of integration and voting rights activism. No matter how hard they try to turn back the clock, in the short-term future, radical-right politicians, billionaires, and extremist religions will find that America as a whole, while always contentious about one damn thing or another, has no appetite for the toxic racism those people want to use to separate us so they can defeat us in detail. We like the egalitarian and inclusive nature of our country that has been cultivated through conflict and long, hard work.

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To put a finer point on it, the efforts to separate us and to set us against each other are failing and will continue to fail. While we watched the events in Minneapolis, we saw men and women of all races and of several languages standing together to fight what amounted to an armed invading army. Think carefully about that! Their lives, homes, and businesses were at serious risk and instead of buckling and surrendering to enormous pressure, they chose to link arms and resist together the abomination that is ICE. A great deal of damage was done to men, women, and especially to children, and lives were lost. (Let’s never forget the names of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti and let’s remember too that they were not the only martyrs who died resisting the invaders!!) Nonetheless, the extremists did not cow Minneapolis. The behaviors of ICE and CBP have deeply disturbed and offended most Americans, and that is important.

Consider current polling. We must be careful about polls, and they can lie as easily as they tell the truth. Look to G. Elliott Morris and Strength in Numbers for some of the best polling — other polls show the same trends — and what you’ll see now is that the toxic, disgusting stew of lawless hate, lies, venality, and sex crimes that characterize virtually every aspect of the trumpian/republican/billionaire/maga/extremist cabal can gather, at most, the approval of about 32% of Americans. On specific topics, the approval of the extremists falls even deeper into negative territory. What’s important here is that gradually, the plotters are losing their adherents as more and more Americans see what they actually are doing. The lies are unraveling.

There are other important indicators, besides polls, that show starkly how unsuccessful the cabal has been in dividing us. A few minutes before I began writing, I read the story of a Texas town that had been voting +55 to +60 percentage points for deeply red candidates, but just had elected a Democrat as mayor by a few hundred votes. You already are aware that all actual elections since early 2025 show a dramatic shift toward Democrats, and the Dems won all but a couple of those. Actual elections starkly confirm what the polls are saying.

It isn’t a big leap to expect that when the majority that stands now in opposition regains power we will see a major REACTION to this lawless interlude. At one point, I listed about a dozen factors that caused our people to lose their way. (I’ll put a list of those elements, with minor changes, at the bottom of this essay.) When the cabal is beaten back and liberal (free) people again grasp the reins of power, we will make significant changes that will make our democracy more robust and more resistant to attacks like the one we’re battling now.

Though racism is only one of several factors that led our nation to go down such a destructive path since about 2015, it is a good example of how the cabal’s toxic attitudes and goals have shone a light on who and what America is. What we can see is that we have, and long have had, significant flaws in our national character; but we also see that the trends, especially since FDR days, have been toward more freedom, egalitarianism, and inclusion. We truly were perfecting our union until the assault on our democracy was launched during the Reagan administration. The reactionaries first were prompted to act because oil companies realized that the effect of burning fossil fuels on climate was a fatal flaw in their business models and they were determined to lie and obfuscate to prevent any action that would diminish the use of fossil fuels and their profits.

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And there we have the deep and ominous bass note that underlies much of what is happening now. Though we started by considering the impact of racism, we cannot forget that every evil ploy of the cabal is rooted in the enormous amounts of money flowing from fossil fuels and the desperate efforts of billionaires to divert our attention from the disaster of climate change that burning those fuels is causing. When considered together, all the factors that motivate the right take us straight to corruption, corruption on a scale we never have seen before and hardly can wrap our heads around. For the cabal, the unfortunate element in the phenomenon of global warming is simple: It’s inevitable if we keep burning fossil fuels and it is rushing toward us even faster than we initially thought it would. One reason the cabal wants to control the news we see and hear is that they really don’t want us to hear about the droughts, tornadoes, fires, atmospheric rivers, high heat, and unexpected cold that are hitting us — all over the planet — because of the climate crisis. Kinda hard to keep that kind of broadly felt and heard news away from the nation’s citizens, right?

So, then, we arrive at the tech bros. Though a bit late to the game, here they come to the corruption trough for funding for their data centers and their efforts to make homo sapiens sapiens unnecessary, except, of course, for their superior selves. That bunch rivals even the trump family for venality and a despicable disregard for everyone but themselves. America rapidly is catching on to that group’s immoral and grasping nature, and opposition to the data centers is growing rapidly, partly because of the huge spikes they cause in the price we all pay for electricity.

We have many reasons to feel optimistic about the awakening of America, but the panoply of economic effects coming from the corruption of the cabalists, trump’s tariffs, the war against Iran, and the climate crisis — I can’t even list all the disruptive effects of the regime because there are so many — make a powerful argument that almost all Americans — except the epstein/billionaire class — are being harmed in one way or another, and the hurt will only grow worse over time.

I wrote about the importance of time some while back. My point, largely, was that very rarely does any set of historical events come to a head in a heartbeat. And thus it is in this moment, so we must consider what will happen over the next several months.

As time passes, the effects of the incompetence, evil plotting, and venality of this regime will have devastating effects on an already suffering populace. Most Americans are struggling economically now, and they feel little optimism about the future. The inclination of our people to vote and to support Democratic and progressive candidates will only increase between now and the midterms. All the factors we understand to have been a part of extremist plotting, just like racism, are much less potent for the cabal than they once were, and they are losing what potency they still have at a rapid rate.

At this point, many thoughtful people are fearful that somehow the extremists will prevent the elections from taking place or will somehow jigger the results. We have a solution in hand, however, that they cannot match. We must pull a Hungary!

Between now and November 3, we must continue what we have been doing, but we must ramp up our efforts. We must be loud in every way. We must write to the editors of our local papers. We must show up at every opportunity at protests and fill the streets with our voices and signs. We must call our legislators continually and voice our opinions on every issue and we must, above all, make an impressive show of our support for our egalitarian, inclusive democracy. Constant, loud voices! Giving to campaigns and volunteering for them as well also will move the needle.

Above all, every damn one of us must vote! See to it!

Many of us have been concerned that the Democratic Party, which has had some poor polling, just didn’t get it. Well, it took some time, but now even Jeffries and Schumer are doing better in their leadership roles, and that likely will improve the polling for Democrats. With people like the many excellent Democratic candidates, along with Bernie, AOC, Murphy, Raskin, and the woman or man who will be our next president out there leading, we’re seeing a better party. (The DNC hasn’t quite caught up yet.) We’ll win the midterms, but it must be by a huge majority based upon a mammoth turnout. If we make it so, cheating will be very, very difficult for the regime.

We have a clear path to victory for one simple reason: As time has passed, the American people have awakened, and so have the citizens of other countries, such as Hungary. Surprisingly, even Russia seems to be nearing a nodal point too. Much of this new attitude, all over the planet, is based upon the awfulness of the regime and trump himself, but, and here’s the main point of it:

This TIME has become an inflection point, one in which both America and the whole world are coming to realize that what comes after must be much different from what went before!

The fall of the Roman Empire, WWII, the rise of Islam, the Renaissance, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the Black Death, the Enlightenment — all of these were times when everything changed and the planet took a sharp turn. Thus will it be after we clean up the cesspool that is the current regime. America is ready and eager to leap forward, and so is much of the planet.

This won’t be easy, and it won’t be quick. Ha! You see it coming don’t you: It will take time, but oh how much better matters will be afterward. Not perfect! Humans don’t do perfect, but we get better in increments small and large. This will be a big increment.

Long live our egalitarian, inclusive democracy and ever may we find ways to make the union more perfect.

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Here’s the list of several elements the cabalists manipulated in order to divide, confuse, anger, and dispirit us as well as to steal from us. This isn’t an all-inclusive list; you’ll see here only the most obvious pieces. I have combined some parts, too, to make the list just a little shorter. Each item deserves a lengthy discussion, which I have provided in a previous post.

1. The enormous wealth inequality that has been engineered into existence over the last eighty years. (Citizens United is both a manifestation and a tool of this inequality.) The contest between the understanding of economics of John Maynard Keynes, on the one hand, and the Milton Friedman school of thought that has promoted neoliberalism and trickle-down economics on the other hand. Keynes was right; Friedman was a partisan hack.

2. America’s own anti-American propaganda (Fox, etc.) and Russia’s misinformation assault.

3. The campaign against America’s system of public education.

4. Lies about the climate crisis initiated by deep-pocketed fossil fuel interests.

5. Efforts to undermine our work in foreign affairs and our efforts to keep the peace. Abandonment of Ukraine.

6. Intensifying American racism.

7. False claims about our economy, followed by incompetent management of the levers of government that affect the economy. Abandonment of anti-trust laws.

8. Misogyny. The attacks on women’s rights are a major part of the radical agenda.

9. Abandonment of traditional and valid moral values — greed is good? — and a radical, self-serving mutation of traditional religion into a weaponized version of itself.

10. The “change factor.” America and the world have changed very rapidly during the last 100 years, and the rapidity and nature of that change have left many people feeling off-balance and concerned about the future. The effects of those rapid changes were exacerbated dramatically by the Covid crisis.

11. Growth of the epstein pedophile ring. It’s origins and purposes still are being plumbed. Identifying and prosecuting the obscenely rich men who were engaged in these activities is a major goal of reform. Providing relief and closure for the survivors is very important. Exposing whatever roles spies and the security agencies of major nations played in the matter also are extremely important.

12. Accountability. The perpetrators of many of the illegal and otherwise nefarious activities of the extremists have not yet been held accountable. Complete accountability is necessary to end the current crisis and to prevent a repeat of it. People must go to prison for what they have done.

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We can simplify matters and organize our thinking around the one aspect of the regime that brings all its offenses into perfect focus: There are enormous moral issues that have been raised by the behaviors of the government under the current regime.

A professor of mine once said, “No enterprise based upon low morals can thrive in the long term.” I believe that to be true, and virtually everything about this trumpian regime smacks of rejection of our time-honored conceptions of right and wrong.

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The moral and ethical issues are paramount in importance, the essential kernel at the heart of our resistance, but they often are lost in the news of the day. What trump and his accomplices are doing is simply wrong. Whether it is separating children from their parents and dumping them into filthy detention centers or actually killing in cold blood protesters who committed no crimes, or any of a very, very long list of other immoral behaviors by members of the regime, we always must raise the cry that what they are doing is wrong and immoral, EVEN IF THE REGIME HAS PRESCRIBED THAT BEHAVIOR. Constitutional issues, legal concerns, questions of international law — all are subsumed into questions of morality. After all, fundamental law should be, and usually is, based upon questions dealing with what is right and wrong for our society.

Trump himself on more than one occasion has endorsed, specifically and emphatically, behaviors that are both patently illegal and immoral. The attack on Iran is a massive war crime in itself and is an immoral act that has killed thousands. (Of course, Iran for years has been subjected to a profoundly oppressive theocracy. That does not absolve trump and his government of the immoral and illegal acts they have perpetrated upon the people of that nation.) Not once has trump or any of his minions expressed regret about such horrors as the murders of Good and Pretti in Minneapolis. Never have any of them suggested that it is wrong to assault women in the street and then tear them away from their children. Instead of regretting the wrong of “arresting” five-year-old Liam, they persist in trying to seize him still. So many wrongs and never a regret or apology. The immoral behavior, which attacks the very heart and soul of America, is the point and will continue.

The successful resistance in Minneapolis, with its growth of “neighboring,” is the result of people trying to do what is right for each other and for the community. At its heart, what grew out of the murders of Good and Pretti in that city is a clear expression of the moral values shared by a large proportion of it’s people. The very concept of community, which has implications of “the common good,” is an expression of moral behavior.

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It may not seem intuitively clear that the underlayment of economics also possesses a huge moral component. When the reformers of the administrations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt — 1933 until FDR’s death on 12 April 1945 and continuing under President Truman — went about transforming our society from one that focused upon the desires and grasping behaviors of the very wealthy, they did their work partly because for a nation founded upon principles of equality and inclusion, the political and economic landscape of their day seemed immoral. The game was rigged for the rich and the outcomes they saw were just awful for the average American.

The Gay Nineties were gay only for the rich and those conditions stood atop an economy that almost constantly was in a state of depression for the working people who made up ~90% of the population. By the late 1920’s the rich had jiggered the entire economy in their own favor in such a lopsided fashion that it took very little to tip it into The Great Depression. As bad as that was, it gave a reformer like Roosevelt the opportunity to modify, dramatically, the rules of the game. He and his administration quite consciously created a consumer economy that, among many other objectives, focused upon providing jobs, raising wages, making certain that the elderly poor could live out their days in dignity instead of abject poverty, imposing regulations on financial institutions, and giving working people the power that came from new laws supporting unions.

You will remember Frances Perkins, one of FDR’s key partners in working to make the economy a more level playing field. She was acutely aware of the oppression of working people that prevailed before the election of 1932. She was an appalled eye witness to the horrific deaths of the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, and that experience made of her a determined advocate for working women and men. In the fire, 123 women and 23 men died from the fire itself or from jumping out of upper storey windows to escape the flames. (If you don’t know the details, please look up the incident. It highlighted the vicious oppression of working people in a sadly emphatic manner.) Perkins was essentially the creator of Social Security and she was a powerful force in creating the labor laws of the New Deal. Those laws — The Fair Labor Practices Act was one — focused upon putting into the hands of working people more power to shape their own lives and to stand up to oppressive employers.

While Perkins’ work during the New Deal years is not the entirety of the story by any means, it gives us a snapshot of the goals and practices of the FDR administration. Move money and power to the average American and everyone prospers.

[If you want to understand the economic issues better, find some good commentary on the work of Milton Friedman, an economist whose supply side attitudes have done so much to hurt average Americans. Then take a look at the work of John Maynard Keynes, the demand side proponent whose work has inspired Democratic politicians whose policies generally have brought a stable economy and prosperity for most Americans.]

When we consider moral questions of right and wrong, it seems appropriate that all people should have the opportunities to choose their own way in life and to earn a decent living. In that sense, the New Deal’s programs composed an effort to reform our society into a more moral construct. The work was the basis for the “Happy Days” economy of the 1950’s and 1960’s.

Morality plays a decisive role in many of today’s important issues. Racism, quite simply, is immoral. Making life-giving health care unreachable for millions of Americans is a moral issue. Keeping Americans from prospering because they cannot work because child care is prohibitively expensive is a moral issue. Oppressing women and denying them control of their own bodies is a moral issue. Insisting upon burning fossil fuels that, in time, will make our planet uninhabitable is a moral issue. The matter of imposing one’s religion on others who see the world differently is a moral issue. Lying and hypocrisy are moral issues. Making unjust war and committing genocide are moral issues.

One might object that not everything is a moral issue. Well, the extremists just have a knack for choosing the immoral side of many concerns of the American people, I guess. By aligning themselves so stubbornly with those who seek to destroy our egalitarian, inclusive democracy, the Republican Party has de-legitimized itself. Democrats who try to occupy a middle ground by taking big money from PAC’s and the ultra rich risk losing everything when people understand how untrustworthy that makes those politicians, and that realization is now dawning upon very many of us.

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While most Americans understand moral and ethical issues in roughly the same manner, there is a tiny minority who see those concepts in an entirely different fashion. For the ultra rich, the tech bros, and all of those adjacent to the people and families who possess obscenely huge amounts of wealth, morality is warped and made unrecognizable by the notions they have about eugenics, technology, and their own class. In their way of thinking, only they — and in the U.S., “they” probably number ~2,000 people — are deserving of any consideration and their wealth gives them the power to push ordinary citizens into the shadows. It is this process of marginalizing the citizenry, over a period of nearly 80 years, that produced the resentment, grievance, and anger that birthed maga. As Bernie has so often said, “They want it ALL.” Bernie is right; they see little use for the rest of us and their sense of morality is far from being truly moral. They see value only in themselves.

The Horned Moses of Michelangelo.

We live in a nation where the economy is capitalistic. Capitalism is a great engine for the production of wealth, but without strong regulation the rich can come to control it and to funnel insane amounts of wealth into their own pockets. Laissez-faire capitalism, with little or no regulation, is immoral. It is a classic scheme to rob the poor to further enrich those who already are extremely wealthy. In fact, without strong regulation, capitalism becomes a robber baron system filled with corruption and cheerful exploitation of workers. One of the major factors contributing to our current problems is that the rich have eliminated many of the reforms of the FDR administrations and virtually have returned us to robber baron times.

This recitation of what is moral and how far from a strong moral stance we intentionally have been shifted by the obscenely rich may seem like a pessimistic account, but it isn’t. Here’s why: When a socioeconomic system moves so far away from any sense of fairness and morality that large swathes of the country are angry, fearful, and determined to effect reformation, those beneficial changes usually come along. What are the polls telling us now about how Americans feel about what is being done to them? No regime can withstand this level of blowback, regardless of how much they lie and obfuscate.

When we deal with individual, specific issues without referring to party or cult loyalties, the level of agreement in our nation is very high when it comes to right and wrong. Even so, it will take many years to iron out all the unpleasant wrinkles the extremists have introduced into our attitudes and our government. For those of us who yearn for a better future, the prescription is simple and powerful: We have to work for it. By now, most of us know what composes our work. You know, constant phone calls to congressional delegations, letters to the editor, political meetings, protests in the streets, etc., etc.

We must keep our eyes upon the midterm elections, of course. A constant effort to be sure we are registered, knowing what kinds of shenanigans our individual states are up to, showing up in one way or another to vote, making sure friends and relatives vote too. Voting day likely won’t be the end of it, but it probably will be the beginning of the end.

Years from now, historians will write of us that when a demon came for our democracy, we did not quail. We fought a second revolution, and we won!

REMOVE TRUMP NOW!

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If we win this fight for democracy, and if we have a chance to perfect the democracy we have, what will we want to see happen? Can we list our goals in such a way as to make them actionable. The list below is a first shot at that target.

Please carefully consider the action steps listed below. Make sure you have a list of your own. Encourage groups to which you belong to make such lists. The more often and more concretely we envision the future we want, the more likely it is to happen.

Please comment on what you think is missing or incorrect in any way. This kind of vision takes on a life of its own. It also scares the shit out of the other side, so let’s make it happen!

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We’re gonna win this thing!

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Twenty-five Actions to perfect our democracy:

1. Democracy must be preserved, in part by making registration to vote and voting as easy as possible and accessible to all citizens. New laws, and perhaps an amendment to the Constitution, will be needed to fortify the right to vote. We must consider making voting day a national holiday.

2. We all are equal, have equal rights, and protection of those rights is a critical function of our government. We do not discriminate by race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age, or national origin. We must shore up protections for the rights of all members of our society.

3. Access to excellent health care is a human right. We immediately will move to a single-payer system that does not involve private insurance except as an add-on individuals may choose at personal cost. The health care system will be funded by taxation indexed to income.

4. A woman has an absolute right to control her own body, and will have access to reproductive health care, including contraception, abortion, and prenatal care.

5. The Equal Rights Amendment will be revised to an up-to-date form, will be passed in Congress, and will be presented to the states for ratification.

6. Education is a public function that will serve all students and that will be supported at a high level by public funding. All our educational institutions have a right and an obligation to teach science, civic values, and all other subject matter that is objectively, empirically true and that supports our democratic way of life.

7. Americans possess a right of freedom of religion. No one has a right to impose her religious beliefs on others. Our government is and will remain strictly secular. Any religious institution engaging in political activity will forfeit its exemption from taxation.

8. Capitalism is a powerful economic engine, but it must be regulated carefully so that it works equally well for everyone and does not enrich only the few. Laws against monopolies will be strengthened and enforced. Banking laws will be strengthened. No company or bank will be permitted to take risks with other people’s money except with expressly permitted by valid, legal contract.

9. Workers’ rights will be preserved and the ability to unionize will be protected. New laws or a constitutional amendment will be required.

10. Taxation will reflect our egalitarian values by being both an instrument for supporting the functions of government and a tool for preventing the accumulation of huge amounts of personal or generational wealth. The IRS will be strengthened and funded sufficiently so it may act as a tool for preventing tax evasion.

    

    [It’s cold now, but the sun is shining through!]
    

11. The federal debt limit will be abolished. Each Congress will owe to the American people expression of a specific plan to reduce national debt while covering expenditures with adequate taxation.

12. Money is not an aspect of free speech, and spending upon and contributions to political campaigns will be severely limited by law. The country may choose to provide public finance for all campaigns and to eliminate private contributions.

13. Corporate entities possess neither personhood nor the legal rights of a person and will not be regarded legally as persons.

14. Gerrymandering will be eliminated through federal statute and a standardized method of judging fairness of districting will be implemented.

15. Because it is an existential issue, the climate crisis will be the highest order of business for our governments and is our most important challenge other than preservation of our inclusive, egalitarian democracy.

16. The Constitution will be amended to limit members of the House of Representatives to a total of three terms and members of the Senate to a total of two terms, regardless of whether those terms are consecutive.

17. The Electoral College will be abolished and presidents elected solely by popular vote.

18. No prisons that are owned and operated privately will be used to house prisoners of any governmental entity and all prisoners of the federal government will be housed within the borders of this nation. Prisons will be operated in a humane fashion.

19. Immigration law will be rewritten with several values in mind: Immigration is a wellspring of strength for our nation and must be less fraught for those who come here. We will provide a refuge for those who are oppressed and whose lives are in danger. It is a proper function of government to limit immigration when the intent is ethically defensible. All “Dreamers” and those in similar circumstances will be granted a path to citizenship immediately. An adequate number of judges and immigration courts will be provided so as to limit the waiting time for immigration cases to be decided.

20. The American experience with ICE, CBP, and other federal agencies used by the trump administration to oppress the people is deeply instructive. Any person who in the name of any instrument of the federal government violates the Constitution will be held immediately accountable. Laws will be written and the Constitution will be amended to ensure that we never again come under attack by our own government and to ensure that our Constitutional rights always are protected. Those who violate the rights of Americans, our laws, or the Constitution will be arrested, adjudicated, and imprisoned if convicted.

21. Term limits will be set for judges on the United States Supreme Court. No judge will serve longer than ten years. A code of ethics for Supreme Court judges will be imposed by constitutional amendment. Judges violating the code will be removed from their position and subject to criminal prosecution.

22. The Supreme Court of the United States will be expanded to 15 justices.

23. Appropriate regulation of guns will be implemented, to include banning assault weapons and handguns. These United States will put into place a national database tracking guns and the individuals who traffic in them and will license all gun owners after a background check.

24. Attempts to overthrow our egalitarian, inclusive democracy are treason and will be prosecuted and punished to the fullest extent of the law.

25. The United States will not go to war unless and until Congress declares war.

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So, what policies are Democrats proposing to respond to the concerns of America? Can you name one bill they already have written or are writing that will begin the repairs and right the wrongs? In public statements and appearances, they have plenty of negatives to spout about the extremists, they are digging into the epstein files, and trump helps with his unhinged behaviors, but where’s the policy substance?

Oh, well, they have taken one concrete step. Ken Martin and the DNC he runs have decided not to release the autopsy report on why Dems lost the ‘24 election. Now, when a big event like an election goes bad, and you do an autopsy, but then you refuse to release that report, what kinds of thoughts should we be having about WHY the hell they won’t trust adult Americans with that data? How bad could the news be? And if it truly IS some sort of indictment of the party, wouldn’t that be a good place to begin in trying to get matters right for ‘28?

Trump likely already has ensured that Dems will win in ‘26, probably win big. But, if the time between ‘26 and ‘28 is full of a great big nothing coming from Dems, we likely will ying-yang right back into the arms of the extremists and lose the presidency again.

The one consistent attitude in America for the last decade plus has been that the average citizen is being screwed. No one in DC is listening, they know. And in every election they’ll choose the party and candidates they believe are most likely to tear it down. And here’s why: THINGS ARE GOING BADLY FOR THEM AND THEY SEE NO WAY OUT! They see Dems as feckless and tied to big money and Republicans as grifters also tied to big money.

Gosh, it kinda seems obvious that milquetoast leaders like Schumer and Jeffries, both of whom receive huge amounts of money from big donors, simply and definitively are NOT the leaders to make Dems into the workers party again and to win the hearts and minds of Americans. There is one single step that would take us a long way toward becoming the effective people’s party of old:

TAX THE DAMN RICH! TAX THEM WITH TOP TAX BRACKETS SIMILAR TO THOSE IN PLACE UNDER EISENHOWER AND ADD TO THAT A WEALTH TAX! (Trust me; they can afford it and still will be rich, just not quite as filthy.) You’ll be shocked to see what that does for the federal budget.

What Americans are experiencing is something they don’t fully understand, but they know what they feel. All those effects stem from a scheme to move money to the filthy rich and to steal social supports from average Americans. Republicans and the extremists love it because they are in on the grift, and they have a fully realized propaganda system to blame it on Dems.

It would be so easy to say the right things. Of course, some big donors would abandon Dems, and then we’d just have to speak honestly to voters. You think that wouldn’t work? Americans have become so accustomed to a steady diet of lies and mealy-mouthed pablum that they are deeply hungry for the truth. It’s a winning strategy and it’s the RIGHT strategy. Many of the current and upcoming Democratic candidates are young people who are eager to plot a new course. Support them and empower them to make big changes.

All the other policies flow from there. With increased tax revenues address the issue of making housing available to young Americans at a reasonable price. Install child care programs. (Remember Mamdani?) Restore health care tax subsidies, or, better yet, adopt a single-payer system and actually make health care the focus, not the profits of insurers who not only provide no added value to the system but also steal from it. If Dems are feeling frisky then, they actually could cobble together a sensible omnibus immigration bill that provides humane treatment for everyone, but also sensible control of the border. And, they must eliminate ICE altogether, not just stick on a few cautious conditions to their illegal murders, abductions, and warrant-less searches.

It’s really important to keep in mind that money flows in deep and wide streams that most of us never notice. Why has America provided so many weapons to Israel when that country has been engaged in genocide? Netanyahu is pulling his own autocratic tricks and we’re enabling him. Solving the Middle East is like unwinding the Gordian knot, but some parts of it are no-brainers: Americans really don’t approve of dropping 2,000 pound bombs on kids. Dems need to capture this issue.

That only scratches the surface of what Dems could accomplish if they throw off the yoke of the lying, thieving, filthy rich and tax them properly. Really, the sky’s the limit! A second New Deal sized to fit the 21st century; that’s what we need. But if the Dems don’t go big on tearing down the corrupt system we live under, get ready for another lurch to the right in succeeding elections. Americans often don’t grasp some of the details — they actually have lives to live — but they know when things just ain’t right.

Perhaps we need to provide Dems with a handbook. On page one, we’d print in bold the definition of LEADERSHIP.

Make things right or kiss democracy goodbye!

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[We never know for sure as matters occur, but this may be the end of trump. He has lost on tariffs, which are essential to the core of what he and the extremists see as his “economic plan,” his standing on immigration and ICE has turned hugely negative, and the epstein revelations are damning him daily. The knock-off effects of this decision on tariffs are going to be very, very large and mainly hurtful, both to America and to trump. The tariffs are a wrong that cannot be righted without serious pain.]

Some individuals who are that stunted in their emotional development compensate intellectually through learning and by attempting to convince others that their desires and opinions are based in reason and fact. Trump doesn’t do that because he never possessed the slightest bent toward the intellectual, never learned about any of the many facets of the planet he inhabits. Every aspect of his id is directed at forcing himself on others.

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With almost any other person we might object at simplistic explanations of the individual’s actions. Surely, we think, they at least got some substance from their family situation, their interactions with peers, their schooling, but the damage trump suffered as a child made him impervious. His dark interior is totally bereft of empathy. He neither has that sense nor understands it, and that absence takes us to his zero-sum understanding of this world. For trump, every interaction has a winner and a loser and, to him, nothing is worse than a weak loser.

When he spoke about the tariff decision, we saw the true inner trump, again. Someone dared to tell him “NO!” His reaction was almost totally emotional. He threw a tantrum like a four-year-old. He’s canny enough to try to use grownup words and read some of his comments from a prepared script, but he clearly demonstrated that the country is in the hands of an aging, demented, emotionally stunted, madman who has little to no impulse control.

And, he has the power to launch nuclear weapons.

The process through which we reached this nightmarish situation is something many writers have discussed. There are myriad elements that interacted within and without our nation that made us vulnerable. One important element right now is the cult that forms trump’s base. It still makes up 25% to 30% of the nation. Many of those people see the brutality and cruelty that result from having our nation in the hands of such a person as trump. Even so, one strong factors holds them tightly together, the promise of their radicalized religions that trump will bring Armageddon. They’re told to hang tight and await salvation. Hard to understand, but it also is hard to leave a shared-delusion cult that contains many of the important and influential people in one’s life.

Another critical factor is the simple fact that in this moment we are in a battle to save our democracy from the filthy, but powerful, rich. Our political system has worked less and less well for the average working person since Reagan began dismantling our social system in favor of handing control to the rich. That long-game plot has succeeded, and even poorly informed Americans understand they have been screwed. It doesn’t help that our only alternative to the extremists is a Democratic Party that also is controlled by monied interests.

Now, more and more Democratic candidates in real world situations are leaning left and fighting against money, power, and the extremists who once were Republicans. There is a great deal of work to be done, but we cannot accomplish it without a massive effort and without policies that divorce us from the power of money and are founded in an intention to TAX THE RICH! One of the best first steps the Democratic Campaign Committee can take is to reveal the analysis they commissioned as to why Harris/Walz lost in ’24. They have shelved the study, and many believe the reason is that its results call for the party to abandon its allegiance to big donors and return to its identity as a party for working people.

If Democrats do not identify themselves clearly as a workers’ party, we still may win elections purely because trump and the extremists are so odious, but we will not have delved into the deeper problems of the nation, leaving our future in peril. To be free, a nation must be open and honest. In this moment, both of those qualities are in short supply.

Trump will do more and more damage, and like any ship, the ship of state can endure only so many holes in its hull before sinking. It’s important to understand that trump cares not at all — nothing, nada — about this country or its people. Nothing outside himself matters to him and he will do whatever it takes to cling to power and to avoid consequences.

[I’m not sure trump won’t flee to someplace abroad. He has money stashed in some countries and might feel that he can escape accountability outside this U.S.]

We long have felt that trump would fall. The epstein matter should — SHOULD — by now have made clear what a depraved and destructive creature he is. Revelations from the epstein files actually may bring him down by eroding his maga base severely. Some of that already is happening. True accountability for those crimes would land him in prison for life. He already would be there if only people WOULD LISTEN TO THE WOMEN!

Meanwhile, our work must be to persevere and to make it clear and obvious that we stand for a world based upon a solid set of moral and ethical values and that individual freedom and the welfare of working people is at our core. We must be loud in our condemnation of the sexual depravity that is becoming so visible among the rich both foreign and domestic.

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Accountability must be a large part of our message. This is, hands down, the most corrupt American government ever, and if there are no indictments and no one goes to prison for the offenses that are surfacing, faith in our democracy will be diminished, perhaps fatally. At best we still will have these issues to deal with again.

There are many threads to be resolved over the next few months and then over a period of years. We must keep at the forefront of our minds the fact that our current troubles are founded in conspiracies among the rich; moral failings throughout many elements of our society; and a general, delusional acceptance of the notion that we should and can endure governance by a genuinely bat-shit crazy old man who barely has a toehold on reality. This current struggle to find a way to fight our way free makes clear that long-term solutions must be focused on clarifying and teaching our values. The Constitution needs some serious work as well.

Today, 20 February, has been momentous. It demonstrates that when we work hard and don’t knuckle under to authoritarians and the rich, we can prevail. (What actually got into that court? That needs some examination.) Trump and his co-conspirators are, truly, evil by any measure and their very nature has made them overconfident and incompetent. Those latter two “qualities” are quite helpful for us, but our greatest advantages are our devotion to freedom and our willingness to work our fingers to the bone for it.

Forever vigilant!

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We are not going back. That’s something many are beginning to realize. So many of the characteristics of this nation that got us into trouble are very familiar, and that familiarity bred complacency. We saw only the surface, not the turmoil underneath. A new and exciting period of creation is coming our way, and for it to work, several things must happen. A part of this is to make choices about what to keep, what to alter, and what to discard.

The last ten or fifteen years seem a blur! So many events, some of them critically important, occurred in ever-more rapid succession that it’s very difficult to form a handy gestalt that tells the story. What exactly did happen and how can we manage the future so we don’t go down the wrong path again?

The central issue is economic inequality. It came upon us gradually, making it easy to ignore or minimize, but its impact has been enormous. Of course, the inequality is a created state of existence, crafted by those individuals who want it all — you know the quote. It took something like eight decades to move the checkers all the way across the board from a society that established a true middle class to one that destroyed that class and created the filthy rich, who, although they are at most 1% of us, hold more wealth than does what is left of our middle class. The wealth gives them power we now must overcome.

We failed to listen as the discontent of working Americans crescendoed. We ignored racial issues and turned a blind eye to the growth of radical religions that have become more political parties than communities of faith. As the money flowed upwards, if we personally didn’t feel the pain, we were unconcerned. Someone else’s problems.

There were critical failures of leadership and of free citizens to act!

We watched as our political parties became possessions in the hands of rich individuals and corporations. We saw what the Supreme Court was doing and didn’t act with enough determination to stop it. We now have a situation regarding a health care system that isn’t so much a construct for helping people stay healthy and recover from disease or accident as it is an instrument for extracting as much wealth as possible from those least able to afford being robbed. “Health insurance” is anything but what it purports to be.

Americans also now are staring into an abyss of mendacity and AI slop. We do not agree on the simple question of what is and is not true and what is and is not real, which makes discussion and problem solving almost impossible. It’s clear we’ll have to start from basic objective truths and build a new civil society in which all people at least share the same facts. This may be one of our most difficult tasks, partly because that struggle will pit our citizenry directly against the tech bros and their AI’s. If that seems like a simple or easy problem, well, it just isn’t. And, to make it worse, we cannot survive as a cohesive society unless we resolve successfully this matter of what is true. Perhaps we’ll have to begin with 2 + 2 = 4 and work upwards from there.

[I don’t say this lightly. It is a matter I have considered carefully for decades, and as I see it grow among us, I feel certain it can and likely will destroy us if left unchecked. Artificial Intelligence must be outlawed. Hear this: Already, in the tech labs, they are seeing AI’s that evolve on their own and try to hide their growth from humans. The techs don’t understand their own creations. They’re not out of control today, but at the moment we realize they are, it will be too late. Stop it now. The danger is accompanied by the need for obscenely huge amounts of resources and power, and that alone will exacerbate all our other problems.The only reason I haven’t spoken up more forcefully about this previously is that I thought no one would be so stupid or so rich as to turn AI loose upon the human race.]

We must lay out for ourselves the elements of the new society that we will birth that are non-negotiable. Rule of law. Voting rights. All the appurtenances that must be in place for each individual to live free and to be safe and healthy must be described. We’ll have to dive deeply into questions about the Bill of Rights and how we can insure that those values come with us into the remainder of this century. As incredibly difficult as the process of recreating our foundational documents will be, we find ourselves in a cul-de-sac out of which we cannot flee without accomplishing that recreation.

The entire public school structure of our nation must be renewed and given the support it requires and deserves. Don’t kid yourself; there is no alternative for a democratic and free society. Public schools that teach objective truth are essential.

At the 62nd Munich Security Conference on 13 February, AOC was a participant on a panel. She was one of four members. The others were the President of the Czech Republic, a leader of a center-right German political party, and a member of a center-right Argentinian political party. Both the moderator and the participants demonstrated an impressive grasp of our world’s problems and possible solutions. While discussing the causes of the issues we now face, AOC made a very telling comment. I don’t recall all her exact words, but she did say that “. . . hypocrisy is vulnerability . . . .” She elaborated by saying our false devotion of the needs of working people is hypocritical; our devotion to the value of human life is hypocrisy when we do nothing to stop a genocide in Gaza; our declaration that immigration is a huge problem is hypocrisy when we do nothing to adjust our laws so as to improve the situation by permitting immigration while also controlling it fairly, lawfully, and humanely.

When prompted to consider it, we find ourselves seeing hypocrisy all around us because our politicians often promise one thing and deliver either nothing or something antithetical to the promise. And that makes us vulnerable to the discontent of those who know they have been deceived and are trying to decide whom to blame.

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And then, we’re back to truth telling as an essential element in a free country. Humans lie. All of us at least occasionally distort the truth. We will not be able to stamp out all prevarication, but in essential matters, we must dig out the truth and find effective ways to disseminate it. We must inoculate our citizenry, as best we can, against the deliberate dissembling of self-interested people.

It’s overwhelming, especially when considered in one fell swoop. We have to win, get back into power, and then IMMEDIATELY begin to rebuild. A gargantuan task!

Accountability is an essential part of that rebuild, just as truth telling is. Lawbreakers, after receiving due process, will have to go to prison. Some must be banned from ever holding public office. Those who later properly and lawfully assume government offices must know that illegal or unethical behaviors will result in their removal and that they too may end up in prison.

Why talk about his now? We are not back in power yet. How can we be confident that we will be, ever?

We got into this partly as an effect of our democracy’s having too many low-information voters. They believed he would bring prices down on day one. Likely, a majority of them still are not well informed, although I’m guessing many are paying better attention now. And those who are keeping score noticed what happened in Minneapolis. We owe the people of that city a great deal. They showed us how to stand up and beat the extremist goon squads. It cost lives, and we cannot allow those lives to have been lost in vain.

The tariffs have caused a great deal of economic pain. It’s clear from recent polls and elections that this nation is very goddam “woke” right now. People of all colors, sexual orientations, and ethnicities have linked arms and helped each other. The regime is losing court case after court case.

Anyone who doubts the extremists are in disarray should go back and watch the unhinged behaviors of Pam Bondi in Congress this past week. There are no superlatives that can do that shit show justice. Why did that happen? It occurred because the epstein files are the kryptonite of this regime, a power structure built upon the very pedophile ring maga was told was ruining their lives and sexually abusing children. Now, the true culprits are panicked, and with good reason. Right now the truth is leaking out slowly, but a critical mass of information soon will break through.

They attack our voting rights, but they won’t win that one. Americans value that right more than the regime realizes and we’ll fight in our states to make sure we keep our votes. And, we’re going to win.

We don’t have to guess; now we can feel the wind at our backs, but, as usual, it won’t be automatic. We know we’ll win IF we work hard to win. And, above all, we must keep up the pressure on Congress and dominate the discourse by attending to the issues and by calling them to remind them of one simple fact:

They are ours; we are not theirs!

And, finally, we must keep talking among ourselves and thinking about what we’ll do with our wins. It really is up to us, a rag tag bunch of unruly Americans 340,000,000 strong!

We really are going to make each other proud!

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Tough times never last, but tough people do.

Time wounds all heels.

There’s never enough time.

Parsley, sage, rosemary, and . . . .

Time’s what we want most but what we use worst.

The time for action is now. It’s never too late to do something.

Like the weather, everyone talks about time, but few ever do something about it. Without time, there would be no universe, no us. No action, no human construct of any sort, not even the very air would exist if there were no time.

Only a very few humans seem to have had a truly profound understanding of time. Most of us cannot take a full account of it in the way we function and the way the universe works. We do not have an Einsteinian comprehension of time except maybe to think that its limitations can be overcome by means of a warp drive. (They cannot!)

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Events occur at a time and in a place. We can grasp the concept of place much better than we can grapple with time. When a very large number of events occur and, in time, converge into a hodgepodge that requires us to derive meaning by sorting the places, the times, and the nature of each event and then to impose order and reason so as to understand and possibly explain the pass at which we have arrived, the challenge is daunting. It is particularly difficult when antagonists are exercising skill and determination to thwart our efforts to comprehend and act.

Here’s a good example: As a public school educator, I saw many solutions and reforms come along to “fix” education. (The obvious solutions strongly supported by the data usually were cast aside at the outset, and still are.) Public schools operate on a K - 12 organizational scheme. So, a new program would be imposed to, perhaps, improve graduation rates, and after three or four years, at the most, the new system would be determined to be a failure and then was discarded for another miracle cure. It seemed never to occur to either the critics or some educators that if the goal were to improve a system in which students spend as much as 13 years, the results of the intervention couldn’t possibly manifest until students had spent most of their time in that new system. No one thought seriously about time, probably because they weren’t serious about improving education.

Now we’re in a great constitutional crisis. Most Americans are eager to achieve certain goals to retain and strengthen our democracy while removing the fascist extremists from power. Some people feel optimistic that those goals will be achieved and others feel defeated, despondent, and even fatalistic. The latter see awful events occurring in the now and to them that means future time will be just like present time.

It’s really hard for us to factor in the fact that these current events were aborning many years ago. To deal with everything that got us started down this track we would have to go back many, many years, and we don’t have time for that. But it’s fairly easy to start with a few key events that began as recently as the 1960’s.

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If you want to understand the beginning, you have to consider how wealthy oil company executives reacted to the announcements their scientists made when they discovered global warming. Ironic, isn’t it, that the understanding began at the source? From that time forward, extremely wealthy individuals knew they had to lie, cheat, steal, deceive, and bamboozle to keep from seeing their cash cow completely dismantled while oil, coal, and gas still were available underground.

Ahhhh! But they needed time to construct a plan and to put it into effect. They needed allies in other countries. Above all, they needed to convert at least some critical mass of Americans into disbelievers in objective truth.

You see where I’m going with all this, don’t you? It took decades of time to undermine American education, to make allies of putin, Saudi Arabia, and others whose power depended upon the sale of fossil fuels. It also took time to form a network of wealthy co-conspirators bound together in such a way that they would cohere around the goal of world domination for profit. I’m not sure who hit upon the idea of using the sex trade as the bit that would force the wealthy to play as a team, but it has worked, at least until now. Jeffrey Epstein was the centerpiece, but he likely controlled very little. He was the vile middle man, but once most of the players had entangled themselves in those loathsome criminal behaviors, the web was spun and they all had to remain loyal or the consequences would be dire. Eventually, epstein himself became more of a danger than an asset, so he was eliminated.

The next step was for trump to subdue the nation and impose a Christo-fascistic rule. In 2025 and into 2026 he and his obsequious accomplices set about it with a will, but now he has run into four serious impediments.

First, he personally is seriously ill both physically and mentally, and he was from the beginning ignorant and incompetent. He had no notion of how to construct the dictatorship he wanted because he is by nature a mad destroyer. His only notion of strategy is more of the same without any innovation or creativity. Also, he carries with him an awareness of guilt of his own involvement in the evil conspiracy with epstein. (I think he sees that as a danger to him, but not with any feelings of remorse or shame.) Now he struggles to form coherent thoughts and frequently errs. He’s running out of time.

Second, the American people, 342,000,000 diverse individuals who are steeped in democratic ideals, have had time to gain the proper footing for combating a fascist regime. We haven’t totally mastered all the proper strategies and tactics, but each day we improve, and we are proving to be a daunting force that trump clearly doesn’t really understand. Do you believe there is any way the regime can convince America that ICE are the heroes and the valiant citizens of Minneapolis are the villains? All our side needs is time. With each passing day we get better and trump is diminished.

Third, trump’s key tactics of sowing confusion, demonizing certain people, lying, bullying, and employing a large propaganda apparatus both foreign and domestic, is running aground on a shoal of truth. This likely wouldn’t have happened if trump had taken the time to go slow and not overreached. As it is, the shock of his horrific treatment of the American people, some of whom are immigrants and many of whom are not, and his assaults on legacy media have spawned a plethora of new sources of information in the country. Building on digital resources such as phone cameras and widespread networks, independent news services and bloggers have created a robust new info-sphere to counter trump’s lies and to bring independents and even some maga people over to an anti-trump position. It just took a little time.

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Fourth, at heart, most Americans are decent people. We cannot underestimate the revulsion the average American feels at the thought of the pedophile sex ring within which girls and women were bought, sold, raped, and perhaps murdered. The process of revealing the truth of this horror is taking time to develop, but trump and many of his associates, fellow thieves, and billionaires are implicated and, in time, will be destroyed by the truth.

On some days, it’s hard to fight on because we do not know for sure what the future will hold. We must remember that this complex web of people and intentions took several decades to develop and to put our good country in this fix. Such a mare’s nest takes time to unravel. If ever a time in our history were FUBAR, this is it. The good news is that our side is going to win; just keep fighting and give it time.

Someone once challenged Jimmy Carter on the matter of why he presumed to run for president. I don’t recall the exact words of his response, but it was something like: “If I had something better to do with my time than run for president, I would do that.”

We’re lucky. Like Jimmy, we have something very important and good to do with our time.

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For a long while people speculated that putin had compromat on trump, and he very well might, but it doesn’t matter. Trump is all about manly strength and lording it over others, so he sorta fell in love with putin because he so much wants to emulate him. Putin acts as though he respects trump, but he doesn’t, and trump is blind to the manipulation and hypocrisy. Fox and Russian propaganda are what gave trump maga and the presidency. (Corporatist Democrats certainly did little to impede the process.) So, whenever trump can act to assist putin in his genocidal war of aggression against sovereign Ukraine, he does. A head fake toward Greenland shifts the attention of the EU and UK toward that island and leaves Ukraine without the focus of her main allies.

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America’s own deep flaws have been with us throughout our history, and they feed right into trump’s plots. As a nation we have a very wide streak of racism and many of our institutions, including law enforcement, have been cobbled so as to keep Black Americans under foot. For us, racism is a very long lasting chronic disease.

Toxic masculinity long has plagued us too, as has a very powerful anti-intellectualism. Those two factors combine to form a strong strand of misogyny and resistance to education that teaches objective truth. That’s one reason the ridiculous campaign against being “woke” found fertile ground here. Broadly, many Americans see us as conquerors of this continent who seized it from unworthy savages, most of whom we wantonly killed. And, we’re particularly susceptible to extremist/fundamentalist religions that campaign hard in favor of male domination and female submission as well as, again, anti-intellectualism. Praise the lord and pass the AR-15.

Anyone who reads our whole history occasionally might wonder why any elements of goodness have manifested here at all, but we do have many wonderful people who have worked hard to try to reform us, smooth out our roughest spots, and move us toward a more perfect union.

This latest uproar, an attempted fascist coup, was built on the enormous sums of money the oil companies have made through selling fossil fuels and originated as a reaction to those of us who see what burning those fuels is doing to the planet. At its heart, the extremist movement is an amalgam of a couple thousand filthy rich; a few million ignorant, grievance-ridden, relatively uneducated maga; and a few true-believer authoritarian types who simply do not care how much harm they do to the rest of us. The tech bros are a late-coming element that is composed of relatively younger men who, as teenagers, read altogether too much science-fiction and fantasy and too little of everything else.

[Photo by Taz Tally. View to the Southwest across lower Cook Inlet. Franklin wondered whether the sun was rising or setting on democracy. We know; it’s rising!]

Reading is one of the primary elements that work to develop a sense of empathy. When we read, we often vicariously experience other people’s lives and we are forced to consider how much we all have in common. Too little broad reading results in too little empathy, which suits anti-intellectuals very much since empathy is an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual response they want to avoid.

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The fact that so many elements had to come together in just such a fashion to enable a fascist madman to do so much damage makes it harder for us to fight the extremists because we believe we have to beat them all at once and we can’t even keep track of who they all are and what their motives may be. But that “strength” also is a major weakness. There is no natural cohesion in them and the arrangement works only so long as trump doesn’t destroy himself through overreach, which he now is working mightily to do; or some key people don’t just up and die; or the American people don’t become so thoroughly disenchanted because of the harms he is visiting upon them that they piecemeal undo his and maga’s grip.

If I were trump and the extremists I would be terrified because I would see I had gone too fast and depended upon a house of cards. For the extremists, failure is likely to mean prison, exile, or poverty. (Some maga people moved to Russia because they thought it would be a maga sort of paradise. The men were sent to Ukraine and died in meatwave attacks, the women live now in abject poverty, and the kids are indoctrinated to become soldiers in the next Russian war.)

The maga devotion is the extremists’ great strength, but most of America now is solidly against those extremists and — this is important — maga is eroding. That erosion is one of those processes that occur slowly, slowly, and then suddenly accelerate.

One potent accelerant of the erosion is the inhumanity and general cruelty of ICE, which is presented vividly in the events in Minneapolis. Some of the most hardheaded and extreme maga people love it, but many others really are made uncomfortable. As a whole, Americans are not big fans of evil malefactors who randomly shoot and kill or maim innocent bystanders and leave children parentless. And, after all, trump’s barbaric, callous, demented cruelty cannot be ignored forever. In fact, to be able to use the string of adjectives in the immediately preceding sentence in itself is a thorough condemnation of all the extremists have brought to bear on America. Of course, the versions maga hears on Fox are composed of lies and distortions, and that’s another matter that needs attention.

Today I read a comment that expressed something I have come to believe is happening in our nation. I have seen and heard hints, but this person said it: Something like: Trump tries to divide us, but by attacking neighbors, friends, or just other men, women, and children in whom we see ourselves, he is driving us closer together. Now I go toward the brown person who speaks with an accent, and I believe there is a closer feeling of “we’re all in this together” between white and Black Americans. And, how can we watch American women and children of any ethnicity or color be thrown to the ground screaming as three or four ICE thugs handcuff them and them begin to kick them just for fun? I think these brutal tactics are reforming us as one America. If we cannot reach out to each other without regard for color, accent, or ethnicity, we are more alone and more lost, and now we cannot endure that, so we hug and help each other.

I didn’t repeat those comments in the previous paragraph verbatim, but I got most of the meaning right, I think. As I wrote above, I have seen this and felt it, even in the small social groups to which I belong. We’re leaning on each other more than ever. If you see and feel this, drop me a note and let me know. This is no small matter: THIS IS HOW A COUNTRY KNITS ITSELF TOGETHER AGAIN!

But now, right this minute, we have to rein in ICE, and I think we can do it because we have one perfect chance staring us in the face. The Department of Homeland Security’s appropriations bill has not yet been passed. To get through the Senate, that bill will require some Democratic votes. They must have 60 votes for cloture.

We absolutely MUST call our congressional delegations after MLK, Jr. Day and express in no uncertain terms what we require of them in that bill. Remind them of the upcoming primaries and midterms and indicate that you definitely will vote and this issue will be determinative for you. First, they must appropriate much, much less money that was mentioned in the Great Big Ugly. Second, unconditional immunity absolutely must be off the table and the bill must say clearly that ICE is required to operate lawfully and will be prosecuted when they do not. ICE must be disarmed. Do they need assault weapons and pistols? Do they need tear gas and “nonlethal” weapons that blind protesters? As far as I can tell they have met no armed resistance! No they do not need that panoply of weapons. And, ICE should function only near the border, not throughout the country. Robert Reich in today’s — Saturday’s — Coffee Klatch laid out a nice list of requirements for ICE.

We cannot permit lily-livered corporatist Democrats to let this opportunity slip away!! We must speak to them like Dutch uncles, very strongly.

Remember, when it comes to Congress, they are ours; we are not theirs!

I love my own analyses and think I see this about right, but the truth is that I may be wrong in my understanding or you may disagree with me. If you see obvious flaws, please point them out and that will make me rethink, which I should do often anyway.

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Let’s keep it simple: Bills like the Great Big Ugly can be passed with a majority vote in House and Senate. So when that abomination passed, most Americans assumed that its destructive set of budget cuts, tax cuts for the filthy rich, the ballooning of the national debt, and the elimination of the tax credits in the Affordable Care Act, and more, was a done deal.

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Those first “budget” bills lay out a plan for spending, but THEY DO NOT APPROPRIATE ANY MONEY OR ACTUALLY SET ANY SPENDING LEVELS. The only acts of Congress that set spending levels and permit the money to be spent are actual appropriations bills, and they come later, after the outline plan has been put into place. Appropriations bills often wander quite far from the original plan.

Think of the first set of bills as a Christmas tree that costs nothing because you cut it down in your back yard. Once you have a tree, you must hang ornaments on it, and the ornaments are expensive. They are the actual appropriations bills.

[When the government was shut down, Democrats were using their leverage — and they do have more than you think — to try to force reimposition of the ACA tax credits. Republicans promised to think about it, and the Dems surrendered. Of course, those cuts were not reinstated in the appropriations bill because Chuck Schumer and the corporatist Democrats didn’t have the chutzpah to stick it out and force reinstatement, even though they had the support of a majority of Americans.]

Where do we stand right now on appropriations? A large part of the appropriations bills that fund the federal government have been passed.

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Here’s the BFD about that process: Democrats used their leverage to restore spending in many areas, such as medical research. How could they do that? The answer lies mainly in the Senate. To pass an appropriations bill in the Senate requires 60 of the 100 senators to vote yes.

Why does it take 60 votes and not a simple majority to pass appropriations bills? The reason is that Senate rules — this isn’t in the Constitution; it’s purely a Senate rule — permit filibustering of appropriations. Ending the filibuster requires 60 votes to reach cloture. Cloture is the term that means to end debate and vote.

People often call for an end to the filibuster, which then would obviate the need for cloture. Both parties shy away from ending filibuster because it means that when either party is in the minority, the opposition could pass whatever they want. We can debate the filibuster ad infinitum, but, right now, it is what it is, and that has a moderating effect on what either party can and cannot do.

If you want to understand the history of that 60-vote threshold, you’ll have to look it up. But, here’s the deal: Republicans control the Senate, but they don’t have enough votes to reach the 60 votes required for cloture. Republicans cannot pass those appropriations bills without the agreement of some Democrats. Dems used that bargaining power to restore quite a lot of cuts. If you want a full accounting, look it up, but in this case the threat of filibuster worked for Dems and the American people.

OK! Took a long while to get here, but now we consider the Department of Homeland Security under which ICE works. That appropriations bill has not yet been passed. It will come up in the Senate very soon — I don’t know how soon. The Great Big Ugly laid out a plan to fund DHS with an enormous increase for ICE included. Now, with all the atrocities staring Dems and America in the face, what can and what should happen?

Democrats must negotiate a dramatic decrease in ICE’s budget, must require them to reduce the number of “agents,” must define exactly where and how they can operate, must specify what training is required for “agents,” and must assert that “agents” answer to the law and cannot venture outside it. Do ICE “agents” really need all those guns and all the tear gas and tasers, etc.? It is unlikely Democrats can eliminate the agency entirely, but they have it in their power to weaken it considerably.

[Jay Kuo’s post today is a more scholarly treatment of this whole issue. I recommend it to you! It’s here: https://substack.com/@jaykuo/p-184664816.]

IF THEY DON’T SURRENDER! If Schumer is allowed to capitulate on this matter, we can end up in a bad place when we actually have a chance to hamstring ICE.

Your assignment, and mine, if we choose to take on this hugely important act of resistance, actually is simple and easy. We must be on the phone every day making very sure our congressional delegations know what is expected of them. It doesn’t matter whether our reps are Dems or Repubs, the message is the same. There is no script. This works better if you just use your two minutes to rail at them about the horror of ICE’s unlawful and murderous behaviors and tell them that you absolutely plan to vote in the midterms so they better do what you require of them! (See list above!)

A second act of resistance is to join in protest demonstrations as they are announced. Be on the streets, join in boycotts — there is something out there quite frequently now. Bully for us!

Some of our work pursues nice goals. Some tasks are important but not critical. And then there are those that are actual life or death, blood on the streets consequential. We cannot fail to push as hard as we possibly can on this one. Beyond that, words fail me.

Let’s get it done, NOW! Fuck ICE!

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I don’t know how to emphasize this enough: Franklin Delano Roosevelt enunciated in his State of the Union Address of 6 January 1941 a statement of principles under which the world should function in order to promote freedom, prosperity, and peace. That speech is known as the Four Freedoms speech because FDR emphasized the importance of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. We then fought a horrific and lengthy world war to determine which vision of the future would prevail, FDR’s or that of the fascistic regimes of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Militaristic Japan.

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Few people alive today can recall how long, deadly, and difficult that war proved to be. [We cannot be sure exactly how many died, but estimates usually mention 60 million or 70 million dead. Very many simply disappeared and never were counted so the true number likely is higher.] Even fewer can recall in any personal way what the planet was like in the era preceding WWII. Finally, none of us can project onto the 21st century version of planet Earth what a fascistic future will hold, though we can make some educated guesses and those conjectures paint an ugly picture indeed.

The time from 1945 until the first trump presidency was, in terms of its difference from most human history, almost idyllic. Democracy spread, the people of the planet became much better educated, much healthier — with a longer span of life — much better fed, and much more prosperous. We did not experience perfect peace, but in historical terms it was a much more peaceful time than most that had gone before.

Those who have a thorough and deep understanding of the huge contrast between our immediate past and what is coming if we cannot change the current course of events do not sleep well now. Nor should they.

Two powerful indicators stand out in this moment: First, our nation is, for the first time generations alive now can recall, effectively abandoning a fellow democracy in the time of its greatest need. Trump’s attitudes are disgusting and horrific, and they amount to ceding Ukraine to putin and ceasing all our assistance for that beleaguered nation. Second, trump has made it crystal clear that he and his regime are deeply committed to one of the darkest elements of the American character, a deep and profound racism.

I believe, and hope, that most Americans strongly support Ukraine and want to help them survive as a nation against the unprovoked, genocidal invasion launched by the insane putin. I believe, and hope, that most Americans don’t share the views of the highly toxic racists that now run the show in DC. But the strong jingoistic and racist threads that still run through the American character do, in this present moment, control our behaviors as a nation. If these behaviors are not stopped, the consequences won’t just be severe; they will be monumentally catastrophic!

If it were possible to give Americans a taste of what life truly was like for the average American of the period from the end of the Civil War until the beginning of the first administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, they would be horrified. [American history, as taught in public schools always has avoided difficult topics and candy-coated the story. Much of history is written by and about the wealthy.] Life was much shorter, people were much more often sick, good medical care was rare, disease was rampant, and with few exceptions people were poor. Vaccinations had not yet banished a whole panoply of illnesses that we cannot even easily remember now.

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That is a world to which trump and his evil cabinet wish to see us return. If that change happened really quickly, most people alive now easily could imagine they had died and gone straight to hell.

If you think I paint too stark a picture, consult with historians. Consider the plight of Black Americans during that period. Ponder how matters stood for women in the era before FDR. You can find the true picture, but you have to dig for the data and the stories. The truth about how we used to live and how trump wants us to live again will astonish and dismay anyone who has not considered it previously. The story about how men and women worked to improve our lives is not told well or often, but that is the story of what shaped our best era.

We still can turn this around, even though a huge amount of the damage that has been done cannot be repaired quickly. If we get the best outcome possible, the next few decades will be a struggle, but we must fight the good fight to avoid the worst that might happen.

And, keep in mind, in this piece we haven’t even discussed the matter of the climate crisis, the bass note underlying all our struggles now.

The behaviors of this current regime and their policies have prompted a strong backlash among Americans. All indicators are that liberal democracy likely will prevail in many upcoming elections. But the process will be filled with skulduggery, power struggles, violations of rules of fair play, and the application of both huge sums of money and force. Our biggest advantage is that the average American now seems to be engaged and deeply concerned, and Americans are taking determined action.

Who stands against us? We have discussed this a great deal, but those who oppose us hide in the shadows very often. For this comment, we can point at two elements that work against us and one factor that potentiates them.

Working strongly against us are the obscenely rich. They have worked hard to promote the propaganda war against our democracy and without them much of this wouldn’t have occurred. Their fully financed efforts cloud the minds of a minority of Americans. The second factor that is causing damage is the simple fact that many Americans are racists. They fear losing white privilege, and that fear is something that many of us underestimated.

Ethics and morality don’t hold strong sway over some Americans right now, but in the long run we must attend to those values and let them underpin our work. Accumulation of vast fortunes is wrong, maybe not in and of itself, but with absolute certainty because of its effects. History tells us again and again that the wealthy become highly dangerous to average citizens. And that is a large part of what has happened over the last 60+ years in the United States.

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Racism has no justification whatsoever. Its manifestation always is fear and hatred that produce violence and rejection of the humanity of others. In the end, our civilization never will be what it should and can be until racism is expunged. While racism is extant, people always will find reasons to mistreat “others.”

If our opponents understood the implications of this time in our history for their children and grandchildren, we should hope they would work very hard to turn the nation in the right direction. As it is, their retort is that WE are the ones who don’t understand and their warped understanding stems largely from the vast domestic/Russian propaganda machine that works day and night against democracy, and that is the potentiating factor we must counter. That’s why we have to fight, for now, from the positions the errors of the extremists have ceded to us. They are incompetent governors because they hate government. Government establishes standards of fairness, and they don’t want a level playing field.

Since they cannot govern effectively, they err. We get promises that cannot be kept, such as, “We’ll bring prices down on day one.” They both misunderstand and misstate basic truths, such as the relationship between tariffs and domestic prices.

So we must take the fight to them where they have made mistakes and have misunderstood the effects of their own policies. Above all, we must bring as many Americans as possible into the fray. Each of us must do something every day to move the needle.

If we put all this strife into historical perspective and know exactly what we are fighting against and what we are fighting for, it makes us more effective and more motivated. There is a great deal to be won and a great deal to be lost. So, there is not a minute to lose!

It will be hard, but we’re gonna win!

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There are a couple of problems now, though, for our side. The number one issue is that some of our leadership are past their “Use By” date. Our movement mostly is distributed, meaning that portions of it are scattered around the nation and are led by local activists. That not only is OK, but it also is a part of our strength. Nonetheless, we have to consider what to do about national level leadership.

Sorting out what happened over the last week is essential to determining how we move forward and bring home major wins for Americans and for democracy.

Chuck Schumer is not an evil man or even an incompetent. Instead, he is a man who still is in office when his abilities no longer meet the demands of the moment. He is well adapted to the distant past, but not to the present. Others likely are more guilty than he, but, having chosen to lead, when time and the situation have passed him by, he must exit leadership. Replacing him very likely will bring many dismayed Democrats back into the fight. Something must be done and replacing Schumer with a more dynamic leader more suited to the moment would provide a strong signal that Democrats will fight.

The old Democratic Party also must be replaced or dramatically renewed from within. Moderates are not the people to fight aggressive, extremist authoritarians. And, in this moment, much of the party leadership is made up of moderates. The aggressive liberals who understand this existential struggle and who represent the policies that most Americans favor — the polls tell us plainly what Americans want — must be brought to the forefront. We saw a clear example of how this can and will happen in the elections of 4 November. We must see that again on a much larger scale on 3 November 2026 and in any special elections that occur in the interim.

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[Yes, I know. The winning policies in the recent elections are not radical or even particularly progressive in some respects. Instead, they simply are policies designed to favor average Americans instead of billionaire oligarchs. ‘Nuff said.]

The key ingredients are the enunciation of specific policy goals and a clear willingness to fight. The Democratic Party either will be remade over the next few months, or it will be replaced.

What do we stand for? If the tumult of the last ten months has been worth anything — and it has — it has taught us what issues must be addressed with vigor and aggression.

1. The tariffs the current regime has established have been an unmitigated disaster for the average American. They are a proximate cause of the rise of many prices and make the affordability crisis a genuine disaster for both American families and for our economy as a whole. Inflation is increasing and thousands of jobs are being lost because of those tariffs and the exploding deficits. Billionaire owners have pushed these policies because now they can cut employees and add AI. On this affordability and employment issue, Democrats/liberals must be loud and strong in opposition. Tax the rich!

2. Health care clearly is an issue on which we must take a strong stand. From this crisis onward, America will be sick or well, depending largely on whether we make health care either easily affordable for all or free, as a right, for everyone. The best solution is a single-payer option. Under such a system every citizen would pay a tax for health care, according to income, but would pay nothing for insurance or the care received. Analyses consistently say Americans would pay considerably less for that tax than they now pay for insurance, co-pays, deductibles, etc. This would compensate for the destruction of Medicaid. We should stand strong on this policy and in support of science overall. We must save our programs for vaccinating our citizens, programs that literally have saved millions of lives. Robert Kennedy, Jr., must be held accountable for his efforts to destroy our health system and kill our citizens.

3. Protection of our democracy must be the third leg of our policy stool. Rule of law, due process, elimination of extra-legal oppressors such as ICE, reform of the Supreme Court, elimination of Citizens United all must be at the top of our list, but that’s a bare beginning. Elimination of gerrymandering and guaranteeing the one person/one vote principle are essential. Taxing the rich and restoring social services and fair wages all are hugely important, even though the wealthy will call us socialists! Restoring democracy will be complicated and time-consuming, but right now most Americans understand that the arduous process must be undertaken. No more zip-tying toddlers on the street in the middle of the night! What could be more important than restoring our rights?

4. We must restore our standing in the world as the flagship of democracy, though restoring trust will take time. We must exert maximum effort in support of Ukraine’s valiant struggle to hold off the genocidal attack by putin’s Russia.

5. Most lists like this one leave out one final element. We must hold accountable those who have created so much damage. Should an ICE agent that assaulted a mother and stole her away from her children with no due process walk free? So many instances of the violation of our rights and human dignity are occurring that it is difficult to keep track of them. But, when we restore the rule of law, all those malefactors must meet justice in our courts, regardless of their wealth, gender, or official position. This stricture especially applies to everyone implicated in the epstein files: Not one pedophile or sexual abuser can be allowed to escape proper punishment.

We are at the threshold of the second American revolution. The next year will be a critical test of our resolve, a time when we can dramatically enhance our chances of success.

If we are to succeed in the goals laid out in outline above, we must focus and act daily. Here are some factors that favor us and some actions we can take to take us forward to victory:

Right this minute, the Republicans in Congress are supporting bills that implement trump’s big, ugly bill. Americans hate almost all the provisions they want to implement, such as the destruction of Medicaid, elimination of the tax subsidies that make health insurance affordable for tens of millions of people, a tax structure that transfers additional billions of dollars to already obscenely rich billionaires, and a dramatic explosion of our national debt. There is much more in these bills that now are before Congress that harms Americans and our jobs are to make sure most people know what is happening and to be very loud in our opposition.

We can oppose these bills by constantly communicating opposition to our congressional delegations. That means delivering at least one message a day to each of the three people who represent us. The message is best delivered by phone, but e-mails and paper letters work well too.

We must show up on the streets when we can. The last No Kings was a huge success, but more demonstrations and protests will be coming. Please provide your support by showing up, preferably with a clever sign.

When you can, contribute to political campaigns. Right now, we probably should make it clear to candidates, when we message them, that although we won’t be refusing to contribute, our donations will be conditional. When they fail us, we’ll cut them off.

Speak out as much as you can to help move others to our side. The polls plainly say that what trump and the extremists are doing is wildly unpopular in this nation and the numbers continue to move in our favor. That’s the factor that makes the failure of the Hateful Eight to hold the line that much more revolting.

Any overall estimate of where we stand, especially in light of the election outcomes on 4 November, tells us we are strong in our opposition and they are weak. Many Republicans understand this, even though right-wing polls lie to them. The elections were a strong dose of castor oil to the bowels of the ardent extremists! They know the danger they face, and we must bring that story home to them.

Yes, the capitulation was a betrayal, but those “leaders” no longer lead this movement. We are the leaders, and the recent past affirms the effectiveness of what we are doing. We are the majority by a wide margin, a landslide coming for the malefactors.

WE’RE GONNA WIN!

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Over and above that singularly odious double-cross, the Hateful Eight did it in the face of a massive statement by Democratic voters and their allies that we want no capitulation! We stood united in our determination to overcome the extremists and showed resolve and fortitude in the face of their efforts to intimidate us by voting overwhelmingly for our candidates and against theirs, and this shortly after showing up in the streets in a huge No Kings rally of over seven million people.

Bleak today; bright tomorrow!

We are disappointed and discouraged, in this moment, to see such contemptible and craven behavior by United States senators who purportedly are on our side. Nonetheless, our resolve remains unchanged. We will see the extremists out, but we’ll do that without the Hateful Eight, who now are beyond the Pale.

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These are not ordinary times, and we cannot move forward employing the “regular order.” Instead good Americans are organizing and supporting candidates who step outside the political spectrum to support democracy, oppose the hideous ICE, demand affordable healthcare, support freedom of speech and assembly, feed all our people, oppose corporate greed, eliminate the notions that money is speech and that corporations are people, and on and on with true American values that fall outside party bounds. Above all, we recognize the worth and value of all people, seek to include all people within our democracy, and oppose the vile wannabe dictator whose insanity is ruining our nation. Those who cling to that depraved and repugnant man must look to themselves and decide how much longer they wish to stand in the way of this movement of true Americans!

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But one of the main issues I have been harping on recently will come to a head in Congress during this critical month of September. A budget must be cobbled together before 1 October. The long version of that story would form a very big book, but it boils down to two relatively simple issues.

(Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo e-mail today deals with the budget process and I recommend reading his thoughts. He nails it.)

Issue number one: Will Democrats actually play their proper role and fight for the rights and health of Americans and against the provisions of the big ugly? So far, much of what the Dems in Congress have done has provided new material for defining the term feckless. At a time when we need a full-throated roar, we’re getting whispers.

Issue number two: Will American voters step into the gap, use their phones daily, and force both Democrats and Republicans to get a grip and defy their billionaire bosses.

As you know, I have been harping for some while on the importance of our making the phone calls. The data show that when we do call en masse the impact is huge. A more desultory showing of a few calls here and there has much less impact. It is important too, to be prepared before you pick up the phone. Have a brief message that goes right at them. Voters have an absolute right to make demands of the people elected to represent them, so don’t be shy and don’t hold back.

We can focus on the main effects of the big ugly. It severely damages our ability to obtain health care by dramatically cutting Medicaid. (It also reduces some Medicare benefits, benefits for which people have paid.) Those cuts take away support for our health care system by removing the underpinnings of many hospitals and other health care centers and some will close altogether. (I live in Alaska, and we may lose five hospitals to these cuts, a devastating blow.) Those aren’t the only issues.

Another key fact — one that most Americans don’t understand well yet — is that the big ugly fails to extend enhanced premium tax credits for the Affordable Care Act. This has the knock-on effect of causing a large rise in premium costs for most Americans. Those increases will kick some people out of the insurance market altogether. Every person who leaves the market causes premiums for everyone else to rise, too, as costs are spread over fewer payers. The Center for American Progress calculates: “For example, a 55-year-old earning nearly $63,000 per year in Alaska will see their annual premium costs increase by at least $13,800 on average.” That is an increase in annual premiums equal to about 22% of a person’s income. It’s clear that an increase of that size is unaffordable for most people.

Hells bells, everyone! The steps taken by Kennedy to deny Americans access to vaccinations alone is sufficient cause for high anxiety, deep consternation, and ANGER!

My plea is that we all make September the month in which we badger the hell out of our senators and representative. Prepare with the facts, and then get going; you already have the phone numbers and know the drill. (Use https://5calls.org/ if you need some assistance with messaging.) Get friends and relatives involved in this one full month of activism that can make a huge difference. We must make all our congresspeople well aware that their cushy jobs depend upon their responsiveness to voters.

Holy shit; we’re up to our necks in it!

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Of great importance: An enormous increase in funding for ICE is included in the big ugly. If that happens, ICE will be funded at a higher level than most national militaries are. They now are a dangerous, gestapo-like, anonymous gang of thugs, but with this additional funding, they will become an army of oppression in our own nation. This cannot be allowed to happen.

Even though it’s not part of the big ugly, remember the tariffs. Trump and the extremists lie, lie, lie about what every economist agrees on: These supremely foolish tariffs are taxes on the American people, and as they all kick in, they are fueling inflation. People who thought trump would bring prices down will be amazed and wonder what possibly could have gone wrong.

Deceptively, the extremists have planned to have the worst effects of the big ugly kick in after the midterm elections in November of ’26. This kind of trickery won’t work with us, I feel sure, but we cannot assume anything and must take action.

The big ugly itself is over 900 pages long. But, the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan policy institute, has provided fact sheets for each state that bring home the data. Their home page is here:

https:www.americanprogress.org/

Scroll down until you see the heading “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Just below that you’ll see this section: “State Fact Sheets: How the Trump Administration and Congressional Republicans Are Increasing Costs for American Families.” The link to these fact sheets is here:

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/state-fact-sheets-how-the-trump-administration-and-congressional-republicans-are-increasing-costs-for-american-families/

Scroll down from there and you’ll see the list of states, and if you click on your state you will go to a pdf for your state that provides a brief account of what will happen if Congress activates all the provisions of the big ugly.

Save and print the pages or just pick the parts you want to use and write them down. Our mission is to be sure the people of each state understand in detail what a big economic blow Congress is about to push out onto us. These fact sheets are invaluable and contain information most people don’t have.

Make no mistake: If all the provisions of the big ugly are coded into law and funded — or defunded — the impacts on our lives and our nation will be dramatic and tragic.

Beginning Tuesday, we must spark a huge call-in campaign to our congressional delegations. We all must have a brief statement with specific concerns prepared. Tell them we’re watching how they vote to put the big ugly into the budget and make clear what will happen to their chances of reelection if they don’t stop implementation of that disastrous program. Many of them already have fled their own town halls because constituents are so angry about the big ugly, and many of those constituents don’t even know of the whole impact of what is coming. I seriously doubt that all members of Congress fully understand what they’re doing.

Pull out the phone numbers of your House representative and both senators. Remember, it’s important to call the Republicans and the Democrats. Both need to know we’re out here watching them. Republicans are caught between Scylla and Charybdis. If they vote against these harmful measures trump has threatened to primary them and we’re the other side of the equation. They must know that if they vote for this measure, their careers in Congress are over. It’s OK to let them know we all are really angry at what they are trying to do.

We cannot chew on our collective livers! We must ACT and now is the time!

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Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound! Look, up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Superman!

Yes, it's Superman, strange visitor from another planet, who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Superman, who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel in his bare hands, and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American way.

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Americans long have believed in heroes, individuals who save the day when the rest of us are wandering around oblivious to the danger we are in or are just scared shitless and afraid to act. It’s always someone who somehow is better than any random citizen. It may be a man, like Superman, or Denzel Washington as the Equalizer; or it may be a woman like Wonder Woman, Boadicea, or Harriet Tubman. The trope suggests that without the hero, all is lost.

The heroic actor is such a part of our culture, particularly in entertainment, that when trouble strikes we often unconsciously wait for the hero to step up at the last minute to save us. Of course, there are some examples of times when that has happened. I wonder how it felt, for example, for an enslaved Black women who thought her life never could change for the better to find herself rescued and led to safety by Tubman.

Realistically, though, when our entire society is in peril, the complexity and widespread nature of the issues make it unlikely that one person acting largely alone can pull us through. Consider the broad and deep effort required of our nation, working within a complex pattern of cooperation with disparate allies, to overcome the militarism of Japan and the fascism of Germany and Italy during WWII. Though there was a central set of objectives, always debated long and hard, carrying out the thousands of downstream actions needed to achieve those objectives was a distributed effort. Local commanders and their troops dealt with the situation in front of them with almost no granular reference to the agreements national governments had reached.

A high degree of commitment to freedom and democracy in opposition to dictatorship and oppression drew forth great devotion from individual soldiers and workers in defense plants. Not everyone felt that equally, but in general, the American population worked together for those values.

So, what’s the point? It’s simple, but, at the same time, quite complicated.

Many of us, including me, have complained about the lack of leadership in this moment. Well, in the center, where leadership is supposed to reside, we have trump, who, in cahoots with musk, may very well have stolen the election through manipulating the electronic voting gear in key states. Not only is trump insane by any sensible measure, but he also is sliding rather rapidly into dementia. He’s surrounded by people who seem to lack even the slightest understanding of or adherence to a moral code. They are venal, cruel toadies whose depravity seems to know no bounds. They have sold their souls and regard the rest of us as somehow lesser critters whom they can manipulate and torment as they please because, well, because that pleases them. (More and more, these people refer to eugenics as justification for their immoral, wicked, and cruel behaviors.)

Congress, if in the hands of Democrats — who have messaging problems too — could act as a center of leadership, but they are in the minority. Some are doing what they can, but some also just keep their heads down.

Leadership now is distributed, as it was in WWII. Governors, state and local politicians, entertainers, citizens who have formed or joined groups that work to protect our inclusive, egalitarian democracy, and even random individuals who speak up in meetings or show up at demonstrations are providing visible examples and moving the needle in the right direction some little bit.

Leadership in every state is bringing broad coalitions of people to demonstrations carrying signs and peacefully protesting in larger and larger numbers. These groups are coordinating nationally using a loose communication grid on various secure applications. (No application is fully secure! Any time we write “secure” application, we must read “relatively secure.”)

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Polls are a snapshot of one moment in time and they can be manipulated easily by the extremists. We never can rely too much on them. Nonetheless, since 20 January, every action the national government has taken has caused trump’s and the Republicans’ unfavorables to rise and their favorables to decline. They are far under water now on almost every salient issue. Somehow the needle is being moved and the changes are large.

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So, at this point, we can and should recognize several facts. First, our distributed leadership is working better than any of us probably would have imagined. (We probably should have thought that through a bit more thoroughly, or at least I should have.)

[Here we are! Usually quiet, a bit shy, avoiding conflict. BUT, let someone grab us, bite us, kick us — they usually run away howling in pain! We are a quiet force, but are not to be trifled with!]

Second, the likelihood that a hero, male or female, will come along and in one fell swoop save us is, well, just not likely. The playing field doesn’t permit that easily, so we cannot bank on it.

Finally, the one element in all this that so far is working well for us is our demonstrations, which have become more frequent and which are drawing more people at each iteration.

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Trump’s resort to nationalizing the California National Guard and calling out the Marines is scary stuff. The assault upon and handcuffing of Senator Alex Padilla today was full-on bully-fueled fascism and in no way justifiable. People all over the country and in other nations were revolted and horrified. Very likely, this one act actually will increase opposition to the extremists since the video so clearly shows the senator did nothing to deserve that treatment.

(One aside: Kristi Noem, over an extended period of time, has shown herself in a variety of ways to be as amoral, lacking in any inner values, and as slavishly servile to trump as can be imagined. She is a hollow vessel filled only with an eagerness to perform any act of cruelty that will please her demigod, trump. Trump’s coterie of sycophants compete to see who can be the most odious, and right now she holds the lead.)

For some time, many Americans have seemed oddly oblivious to the emergency within which they are living their lives. Now, more and more of these events are getting some attention, and America does not approve. Now, more people want action and are willing to take action, particularly if a local organization will call on them to step up. We never will get everyone into the streets, but we don’t have to.

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I hope that by now Harvard University political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s research that demonstrates that civil disobedience and nonviolent campaigns are much more successful than violent campaigns in achieving political change is familiar to most of us. In fact, nonviolent campaigns by ordinary citizens are twice as likely to succeed as long as at least 3.5% of a nation’s citizens eventually participate. If we posit that the US has about 350,000,000 citizens, that means we must get a minimum of 12,250,000 people out to demonstrate.

Personally, I would like to see us shoot for 15,000,000 peaceful demonstrators. And, now we have a perfect opportunity to have the kind of huge impact that number would produce.

No Kings Day, this Saturday, 14 June 2025, can be the first day we show that kind of power. How do we make that happen?

First, each of us must get out there personally. Second, we must urge our friends and relatives to join us or to get into the streets even if they live several states over.

Third, we must join in with our local organizations to create signs and to learn where to be, how to march, and how to stay safe.

Fourth, we must check the on-line services that instruct us in how to stay safe during the demonstrations. Various groups provide such instructions, and it’s important to dip into those resources.

It’s a small thing, walking around, but it can have a huge impact. How many folks do you want to see out there demonstrating their disgust with trump, P2025, and fascism? Do you want to preserve our nation as the beacon of rights, freedom, and inclusion?

In just the last three months I have seen too many examples of the cruelty of this regime, so many tears people are shedding, the hopelessness of having loved ones stolen and rushed off to unnamed prisons or concentration camps by goons who themselves are sadistic criminals with no actual official standing. These people aren’t being kidnapped because they have committed crimes! They are grabbed, handcuffed, and then walked off in the most painful and cruel posture possible, just for being. I cannot endure much more of the despair and the yearning to stop this horrific reign of terror! Even some of those who eagerly voted for trump now say, “This isn’t what I voted for.” Well, we could have told them! In fact, we did tell them. Well, drag them on board too, even if they are seriously tardy!

We could list many tasks we yet must accomplish every day until the nightmare is over. But we can take great comfort in the simple fact that we are the super heroes that will stop this terror and get our nation back to its founding principles. It isn’t just possible; it’s a sure thing, if we just get the masses onto the concrete.

Huddle up! We can do this and we must start on Saturday. See you on the street!

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