Zonkerbl wrote:Last week DOGE came and visited my agency, MCC. Up until that point we had felt pretty confident that the agency invented in 2004 by W to replace USAID would end up doing just that. But no, looks like DOGE is going to nuke MCC just like they did USAID.
The Trump administration is evil and fascist and the people who voted for him either support him fully, meaning they are evil, or are just wildly stupid. I have been extremely consistent about that the last several months, and as everything I predicted over the last 8 years has come true again and again and again I would just like to say I TOLD YOU SO. Trump and his supporters HATE AMERICA.
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/trump-alarmists-were-right-we-should-say-so/Those of us who still truly love America are now forced to consider leaving it. It is time to exit this abusive relationship. It is time to seriously consider secession. Let's deport ourselves.
One way to do it quietly is to just start ignoring the Supreme Court. Set the laws you want and ignore any SCOTUS rulings against you, like the POTUS is doing. Let them send the army to enforce it. If they do, then you're justified in seceding and you will probably get an overwhelming majority of people in your state to vote in favor of it, if you want to go in that direction.
Assuming you get away with ignoring SCOTUS decisions the next big step is to stop sending tax revenue to the Trump dictatorship. That's a bigger step, you have to pass a law first saying all tax payments go through your state tax revenue system first and ignore the SCOTUS decision saying that's not constitutional (well, DUH!). Move the overton window over to making that acceptable and then the next step of halting payments to the fed treasury is a small one.
Keep incrementally taking steps to separate yourself from the GOP dictatorship until you are independent de facto if not de jure. During the entire time, start building a local militia to the greatest extent possible. And be obvious about it, brag about it. Foster a sense of patriotism in your home state citizens about it, so when the dictatorship attacks, it is an attack on them personally.
THAT is how you defeat Trumpism.
Interesting piece, I have an absolute litany of thoughts reading it.
#1 Incredibly sympathetic to the arguments, only pieces I got wrong during this era, and I really, really got them wrong, was simply assuming that the Republican Machine would roll over the Trump sort of virus in '15, and not allow him to infect their objectives, I never ever thought they'd let him seize the nomination in '15/'16 no matter how popular he was w/the base. They'd ignored the base on Roe for decades, took their votes, and then pushed policy goals that totally ----ed them over and over without a concern in the world. I never imagined they'd bend the knee and nominate him, I imagined he'd get taken out like Bernie eventually was in '16. The other piece I got wrong was I underestimated how wildly stupid and moronic voters were in '20....considering how blatantly obvious Trumps desire to hide how completely wrong he was on literally everything with Covid, how he basically had his fingerprints all over hundreds of thousands of votes, the fact that he was directly admitting he wanted the way deaths were reported to exclude covid, so the total's wouldn't look so ugly on the Hopkins board (and other media boards showing the rapidly metastasizing death #'s), the stupidity in the press conferences, he was so blatantly obviously full of ----, and desperately trying to hide what was happening because he rightly believed if the economy got shut down, and we treated covid seriously, he would get annihilated in the election, just like Hoover was in '32 by the Great Depression....I just assumed we'd have our first landslide since 1984 because republican or democrat, it was obvious who had totally botched this, and who had acted so purely in their own self-interest throughout 2020 while 10's and eventually 100's of thousands died (weighted towards Republican voters), and if Dem's in '06 and Obama in '08 had had a moderate wipeout of Republicans responsible for the Iraq disaster+Katrina+Great Recession, a Great Recession+Pandemic Catastrophe would lead to a similar wipe out.
Then it didn't happen. Sure, Biden won by what, 7 million votes, a good chunk, and the biggest election win since I guess '08 I think? Otoh, Trump still managed to pull the highest Republican vote total EVER in an election. EVER, after all the asininity of 2016-2020, after the Covid Debacle that was patently and obviously made infinitely worse by his incompetence EVERY SINGLE DAY. The fact that Republican voters came out in force, and voted for their wannabe Catskills Mussolini, after ALL OF THAT? I was absolutely stunned. I expected not so much them to switch to Dem's, but rather to sit this one out, why risk voting and catching covid to support this obvious moron? Instead, they came out in force. I got that completely and totally wrong.
#2 I am again sympathetic to the take. But I also don't think it's totally right. Part of the problem is just that the most hysterical part of the left, right though they may be on Orange Mussolini, also tend to activate Republican Voters to vote in elections at higher rates with their behavior and with their public discourse. The most shrill tend to piss people off, and they tend to share a spot on the Venn diagram with a series of separate mistakes and misreading which did put them on the wrong side of the political consensus on Me Too, George Floyd and Black Lives Matter and Public Protest Hypocrisy, DEI and Affirmative Action (the latter not actually enjoying majority support in the African American Community, let alone the entire US), 10/7 and the horrifying response of Universities useful idiots, Trans and sports (a boutique issue that Dems allowed to be used as a cudgel when it accounted for like .001% of the country), immigration (open boarders, instead of sane border controls: I 100% buy Frum's argument from years ago that, "If you don't control the border, Republicans will get a tyrant elected who will") etc etc. I am in general, on the side of this guy and really buy his arguments about the moron in chief, but I also know that as much as we might want to dog pile idiots like David Brooks, Brett Easton Ellis (I love the guy and his podcast, but when it comes to politics, he allows the far left issues in Hollywood to turn his brain to cheese, in fairness, he's an artist, not a political scientist, so there's that), Glenn Loury (how his brain has become mush on this issue is utterly beyond me), Brett Stephens, the Fifth Column guys etc, reality is, everybody's wrong on different parts of the arguments of society. Nobody owns some clear central piece of wisdom that blends across all issues.....the far left gets some things right but a lot of things wrong, and tends to be equally as repellant in different ways from the far right, the centrists are too often the last to see the car crash coming, the right is too often too fearful of change, to make necessary change in a timely manner, the left of center is too often ineffectual in communicating with the rest of the political community to actually warn effectively (too me anyway) and to disorganized to effectively achieve its objectives.
#3 I don't know who should lead, I don't rust anyone, certainly not the far left who are clearly over the bend, but the far right is even worse, just two generations removed from white hoods and lynchings. I don't trust Brooks and Stephens types because its patently obvious they've never spent a few months let alone the decades I spent working at Title 1 Schools and in the inner city, they know knowing of the real world, but I also don't trust probably who this guy trusts because they are totally ineffective at political communication with 70-80% of the electorate.
#4 It's funny what Zonker says in his post, because I remember after sitting through an early training/con ed session with a district department chair back in '19 that was presenting ways to teach about Revolutions, and Political Instability in the modern world, I mentioned: It's not just North Africa, it's us too, if things don't change here, we could see this country break apart in a decade or two....and I could tell by his face he'd just slotted me into the "don't talk to this guy, he's nut" part of his brain, so 10 minutes later I caught him as we were all leaving and said something along the lines of, "I know it sounds nuts but look at it this way, in '17 a study came out that projected by 2040, 33% of the country would hold 35 senate seats, and 67% would control 15 seats. If that wasn't bad enough, we had already reached a point in 2016 where a Dem needed a 52.5% majority to likely win a majority of electoral votes, in '20 it was projected to be 53-47% to just tie....and I turned to him after saying that, and said, "How is that situation anything other than a broken country and broken government?" Republican's have no incentive to change it because they controlled SCOTUS, and had a built in advantage in all 3 branches (controlling majority in SCOTUS, Senate Tilt reinforced Republican control through empty states with equal senators, and then the House artificially tamps down house representation in the largest most populous states). He had no answer, but I could see he thought I was being a bit dramatic. Things have changed in recent years, with Dem governance in places like California causing dramatic shifts in population (will these voters change their vote like they changed their address? Not sure), Orange Mussolini won again due to two key trend lines: #1 Massive economic pain from post-covid inflation caused all incumbents to get bounced outside of Canada the last several years, plus the country as a whole appeared to be sick of the far left as well (the #'s say it, as does the apparent effectiveness of adds like "She's for They/Them, he's for you," obvious horse ---- but also demonstrably effective with voters, and apparently Clinton was apoplectic at the lack of response to the advertisement for months by the DNC etc, Clinton, always an amoral ----, was also always, a brilliant political tactician), but when I come back to Zonk's thoughts in the above post I can't help but agree.
When I talked about what was going on with friends since Bluexit first became a thing 8 years ago I didn't disagree with it. Republicans have zero incentive to change since a system a large percentage of their idiot voters think is rigged against them, is actually demonstrably rigged for them. Why change when the system benefits you, before we even take into account their machiavellian commitment to maximizing gerrymanders? Why give up their own power advantages. You can sense this from McConnell, from Cruz, Rich Lowery, and the rest of the politicians and consultants, and I feel like I've been screaming into a void ever since McConnell finally took the step too far in '16 with Garland and stealing a SCOTUS seat. All I could think and say at the time and ever since has been, "Eventually, you know this will break? Right? You get that if you rig the game to this extent, eventually Californians, and New Yorkers will look and consider that they pay for all the Welfare Programs the citizens of places like Mississippi, Alabama, Florida or North Dakota refuse to provide their own citizens and instead suck up through the federal government teat, will decide to simply turn off the spigot and walk away? You realize that right? You can only kick people in the face and rub ---- in people's face so much before they walk. This political inertia we have enjoyed for 55 years is basically linked to economic well being, and as our economic well being gets perpetually put at risk by 2 Santa Clause Theory (make the mess and let Dem's clean it up in '92, '08, '20, '28 or '32) and now by Trump being a messianic dip---- of colossal proportions that Republican candidates won't risk pissing off, will come to an end. People will finally begin to think? Why the hell are we sharing a country with the ----ing idiots? Why do we have to share a country with people who hate us and who we've grown to hate too? And then it breaks.
That's the thing that bothers me most. As this horror show builds, if you read Haidt's the righteous mind, it's impossible to get away from the idea that we desperately need each other, that conservatives and liberals work together like chocolate and peanut butter, soy and sugar, milk and cookies. That we offset each others worst instincts and liabilities, and strengthen one another's assets, but as long as we hate each other, we get none of the benefits of any of these things. We get liberal cities turned into homeless, drug den ---- holes, and deregulated states like Texas, with exploding fertilizer plants, no workers rights, and power outages in summer heat, and power outages in winter cold spells. We need each other, but nobody seems to understand that because we've grown so thoroughly to the point where we hate each other.
It feels like Yugoslavia in 1991 more than anything else right now, will the political inertia hold, and we'll just end up growling at each other until we can find the political leadership necessary to bridge these breaks and chasms between one another? Or will we just splinter and break up into sections, The Northeast and West becoming liberal bastions, the midwest and south becoming conservative bulwarks? I don't know. I just know the current situation is not sustainable, and arguing about who was right is immaterial.
This breakup is happening right now, it was always obvious that Trump was an evil, dumb--- moron, who nevertheless had a Catskills comic quality that could bring crowds to him, mixing in just the right "hates" with just the right kind of social comedy to pull 35-40% of Republicans to him. Yes that writer was right, you were right, and I was right. But it doesn't really matter much because we still have to win a working majority of votes to accomplish anything all, and failing that, we have to motivate enough people in the Northeast and West, to be willing to flat out secede and officially break up with the country.
It's a truly terrible time. I have a 9 year old, I can have Canadian citizenship through my father who was born in British Columbia (paternal family is from Vancouver, outside Edmonton, and Nova Scotia), but I don't want to leave, I just want people to get their heads out of their ---es and try to fix this broke country, broke constitution, broken everything, and rebuild it. But everyday that seems farther away and ever less likely
. Its hard to imagine we can ever trust each other again at this point, and that doesn't even take into account the rest of the world watching this with horror, and my personal terror, what if we do get hit by another pandemic, but it's more like the Yersinia Pestis plagues that appear to have repeatedly wiped out 15-30% of populations for millennia after millennia in the past, and it hits a broken culture that will not and cannot trust the CDC, or HHS, that is vaccine skeptic and on and on. Spanish Flu smashed the ever living ---- out of us a hundred years+ ago, something worse, in this kind of cultural environment? I shudder to imagine. It's crazy to think of how different things are from when I was in High School and the wall fell in '89, Mandela freed months later in '90, the world seemed to be waking up to a new century, an actual summer of love, and now 35+ years later, it's a hellscape
.
