Election 2024

To hell with Trump’s voters

by

By Dr. Earl Stephens 

 I have heard way more than enough of this grotesque garbage that perhaps we should try to understand what makes the Trump voter tick, and somehow sympathize with their support of an unapologetic loudmouth who is so vile he sees “good people” on both sides of a violent white supremacist rally.

Have you seen or heard any of this crap?

Have you seen or heard this heated drivel that Kamala Harris and other Democrats have done an inadequate job of connecting with Trump voters who see nothing dangerous about a man who refers to human beings as “vermin,” and has adopted Adolph Hitler’s talking points at his odious campaign rallies?

Have you seen or heard this absolute low-grade nonsense that we should work to lower the temperature in this country, and maybe not take it so personally when one party has gone completely in the tank for a hideous man who told the people who attacked America on January 6, 2021 that he “loves them?”

It is deplorable, and I’m here to remind you it is not normal.

These Trump supporters are shattered people, who have proven only one thing the past eight years: They can ALWAYS go lower, even if it means diving into the dumpster themselves to prove that they truly do believe in their lower cause.

Do not allow yourselves to be gaslit during this the most important election since the Civil War. Understand: If you support the Democratic Party, it does not make you perfect, but is does put you squarely on the right side of human decency and history.

This not only needs to be said out loud, and over and over again, but SHOUTED, because if you are telling me you support the despicable Donald Trump, you have essentially told me everything I need to know about you.

–You have told me you don’t really believe in “law in order” because in fact you support a convicted felon, who is currently facing scores of other felony charges for all manner of crimes, instead of supporting the career prosecutor who locked cheating lowlifes like Trump away behind bars …

–You have told me you don’t believe in democracy, because you support the traitor who helped plan and execute the first attack on our Capitol since 1812, and attempted a violent coup that was one corrupt vice president away from possibly succeeding.

–You have told me you don’t believe in truth and honesty, because you support the man who told an astonishing documented 30,573 lies and mistruths during his epically awful presidency, and does nothing but lie from the time his fat little feet hit the deck in the morning until he finally passes out from overexposure at midnight.

–You have told me you don’t believe in our children’s future or the future of our planet, because you support the complete imbecile who is a sworn enemy of science, thinks climate change is a hoax, and that wind turbines cause cancer.

–You have told me you don’t have a shred of respect for the women in your lives, because you support the felon who physically attacks and berates them, and does not believe they should have the same rights men do.

–You have told me you don’t believe in a strong economy because you support the guy who wrecked the perfectly good one he inherited from Barack Obama so magnificently by failing to pass the only real test of his gross presidency. His multi-pronged failures to answer the COVID crisis, was among the greatest failures in American history. He simply couldn’t find it in his dark, empty soul to drum up even a shred of compassion for the millions of Americans who were sick and dying, and even went so far as suggesting that maybe we try drinking Lysol to combat COVID’s terrible effects. Even wearing masks was a bridge too far for the guy who would have died from the disease if he had listened to is own sickening counsel.

–You have told me you don’t believe all Americans deserve affordable healthcare, because the guy you support tried to do away with that without any plan to replace it, and now pathetically tells us he has “a concept of a plan” to make it better. Can you really be this damn stupid?

–You have told me you don’t really support blue collar, working Americans because you support the guy who passionately hates unions, refuses to support raising minimum wage, and has relentlessly stood up for the corporations, starting with Big Oil, who grease his bottomless pockets.

–You have told me you really aren’t Christian, if I am to understand this religious orthodoxy at all, because I just don’t think Jesus Christ would have much respect for a foul-mouthed, abusive slob, who dutifully avoids church, belittles people who have less than him, and pawns off Bibles online like they are some steak, sneaker, or watch to pay off his endless stream of lawyers, and pad a lifestyle spent behind locked gates, where he cheats at golf and avoids working-class Americans at all costs.

–You have told me you don’t really support the men and women in uniform because you bow to a reprehensible draft-dodger who calls our fallen “suckers and losers” and just weeks ago disgraced the hallowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery for a cheap, campaign photo op. The last two chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of staff, including one he appointed are telling you that the man you support means our country harm, so kindly save all that phony patriotic garbage you are trying to dump on the rest of us.

Truth is, I could go on for three full pages here pointing out your wretched hypocrisies, and gladly would if I thought it would have the positive effect of shaking some damn sense into you.

But I’m not interested in wasting my time with that. You have successfully proven you are broken beyond repair. So congratulations for that.

I am only interested in making good and damn sure people know that YOU, and YOU alone, are responsible for the extreme danger that this country finds itself in right now.

You are complete frauds and phonies, who are most likely white, male and angry to the point of violence. You are going nowhere in life, except lower because you are weak in character, and have allowed gravity and depravity to tug you in that lazy, misguided direction.

You want everything done for you and handed to you on a silver platter, because despite your despicable selves, you somehow think you are owed everything simply because of the color of your lily-white skin.

In fact, you are racist as hell, even if you’d like to somehow think you aren’t, because you lack the capacity to do even the minimal amount of introspection needed to attain the most basic understanding that in this country ALL men (and women) are supposed to be created equal.

You don’t believe in a better America, you believe in an America where you can legally drag good people through the dirt, who you still somehow think are lesser than you, and then have a good laugh about it.

You support the monstrous, orange man because he has given you license to be just as completely awful as you want to be. He brings out the very worst in you, and because you are weak in character, you somehow get off on it.

I will always blame the gross “leadership” in your broken party — 80 percent who know better — for the predicament we are in, as we fight tooth and nail to keep this anti-American loudmouth out of our White House, and preserve our republic.

How dare you put this on us, and threaten to end a country 250 years in the making so casually and pathetically.

And I will alway blame my former brethren in the bought-off, reprehensible corporate media for normalizing one of the worst people in world history. They have done catastrophic damage with their refusal to cover one of the biggest stories ever with the weight and vigor it deserves.

He will do everything he can to end us, and YOU know it, damn you.

But it is you, Trump voter, who I reserve the majority of my disdain. You have been coddled long enough in this country. You aren’t misunderstood. The truth is you have very effectively spent the past eight years making it crystal clear to anybody paying even the slightest amount of attention just how revolting and toxic you truly are.

I understand you all too well, and hope you all go straight to hell for the damage you have done to America, the majority of our people, and the brave souls who gave their lives defending her.

Source: The Raw Story

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

Real men don’t ask fascists to solve their problems, they reject fascism

by

Kamala Harris
Kamala Harris

A note on Harris’s closing argument

By Anand Giridharadas

Two things have grown increasingly clear: Donald Trump is a fascist, and he is winning the support of most American men. But it doesn’t have to be like this. There is a way out.

Yesterday, a breathtaking report arrived in The New York Times. John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, warned in the starkest terms that Trump is a fascist with a real authoritarian vision and confirmed the murmurs about Trump being jealous not to have had the kind of generals Hitler did.

What Kelly is doing is the opposite of gaslighting, acknowledging as a former insider what many of us have long been saying: that Trump is a fascist, saying and doing fashy things. Winkingly encouraging violence. Goading on and praising insurrectionists. Dehumanizing Others. Calling for the use of the military against civilian opponents. Promising a second term centered on vendettas and retribution. Peddling racial supremacy. Pledging to be a dictator on day one. Telling violent allies to stand back and stand by. Vowing that if you vote for him, you won’t have to vote again — and that if you don’t, it will be a bloodbath.

The distressing thing is that a majority of American men are looking at all of this and saying, “Yeah, let’s do that.” We are dude-bro-ing our way into democratic death.

To be clear, a majority of American men have voted Republican in most presidential cycles for a very long time. What is happening now is not Vice President Kamala Harris failing to win over men. What is happening is that the Republican Party being taken over by fascists has turned out not to be a dealbreaker for a majority of men.

The Democrats’ — and small-D democracy’s — men problem has engendered all sorts of discussion and debate and some amount of understandable frustration. As the writer Charlotte Clymer put it a few days ago, “Can someone please explain to me what exactly it is that young men want to hear from VP Harris that she’s not already saying? And please be specific.”

The problem has also triggered unusual organizing efforts, such as the writer and social media maven Liz Plank’s efforts to use social events where men chat up women to highlight Project 2025’s dangers to all Americans’ sexual liberty, including men’s.

What, if anything, can the Harris campaign do about this problem in the final days? Is there, as Clymer asks, any language that can be spoken that hasn’t? Any outreach that can be done that hasn’t? Any policies that could be rolled out that haven’t?

In recent days, the Harris campaign has tackled the problem head-on, announcing new policies and messages aimed at Black voters and Latino voters in particular.

But if the material dimension of the problem has gotten adequate attention, the affective dimension of the problem has not.

If you spend time traveling this country and talking to people and reporting on communities, if you have the lens of a cultural observer and not only a policy enthusiast, what becomes clear is that, when it comes to men and their enthusiasm for fascism now, the affective dimension may be the dominant one.

Which is to say, a lot of men have been persuaded — brainwashed may be a better word — that the future is something that should terrify them. That the future mocks them, thumbs their nose at them. That it will silence them, constrict them, devalue them, censor them, starve them, obviate them, reduce them to jokes.

Now, suspend for a moment your quibbling about whether any of these feelings are true. In a democracy, feelings very quickly become facts. Part of the deal of living in a self-governing society is accepting that your neighbor’s feelings become your reality. The burden of citizenship is accepting that what is not your fault — and may not even be real — often becomes your problem.

A lot of what a lot of men are going through right now is simply the inner experience of the old line, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”

And one of the great sweeping mistakes of our era has been assuming that, because certain kinds of change are morally correct, they go down easy. Because certain destinations are good destinations socially and ethically and arc-of-moral-universe-wise, any experience of discomfort with the journey is a private problem to be suffered alone and given little outside help.

So now here we are in a country that is changing a lot, has changed a lot — indeed, has, over the past few generations, done more to change the status and rights and dignity of women than hundreds of prior generations did. And we have done the right things while failing to manage social and psychological change — failing to manage the minds and hearts of those who experience these worthy changes as headwinds.

This seems to me central to the story of how a majority of men could do what populations bewildered by change and anxious about the future and their place in it have done: support fascism, support dictatorship, support tyranny to smash it all.

Vice President Harris is a prosecutor. She has delivered many a closing argument. She knows what closing arguments involve. In court, they are actually a rare chance where you get to speak on the level of affective. In the rest of a crimianl proceeding, it’s just the facts. Just the evidence. But in the closing argument, you can make meaning. You can tell a story. You can move people.

Because this is the only country I have, I am determined that Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, and the wider pro-democracy movement she represents uses these last days to address part of a closing argument to American men. Not only to roll out policy to them, though policy is vital. Also to speak to them on the level of the gut.

Yes, change is scary. Yes, it sometimes feels like you don’t know how to be these days. Don’t know what to say. Yes, it’s tempting to shake things up when you’re scared. When you feel attacked by the future itself.

But don’t. Because men worthy of the word don’t outsource the care and protection of their families to dictators. Men worthy of the word don’t depend for their self-esteem on the crushing and marginalizing of Others. Men worthy of the word don’t need women to be locked in the fourteenth century legally to feel whole. Men worthy of the word don’t hand over the keys to the future to billionaires who pull the strings.

However one might reject their premises, some fraction of the mass of American men who have succumbed to the lure of Trump’s fascism need to feel seen and heard and recognized in their stress and anxiety and sense of dislocation in the future that is coming. And they need to be invited into a contrary story of progress. Saving the country from tyranny needs to become aspirational for men. Not a lecture.

They need to remember, and become excited to say, that real men reject fascism.

A request for those who haven’t yet joined us: The interviews and essays that we share here take research and editing and much more. We work hard, and we are eager to bring on more writers, more voices. But we need your help to keep this going. Join us today to support the kind of independent media you want to exist

 

Source: Real men reject fascism – by Anand Giridharadas – The.Ink

Totem and Taboo

by
 

An interview on politics, music, journalism, tech, and our not-so-inevitable doom.

 
By Sarah Kendzior | Oct 21
 

The oldest store on Route 66 in Missouri closed last month. I don’t remember the last time I visited. But I will always remember that it was the last time.

The Totem Pole Trading Post opened in 1933 and moved down the Mother Road until landing in the small city of Rolla. I was in Rolla to see a geology museum rumored to have minerals shaped like a Missouri breakfast — bacon and biscuits — but it was closed. I went to the Trading Post because it had always been there, and would always be there, and found that it was there no more.

*          *          *

The door was unlocked but the lights were off.

“Are you open?” I asked, confused, looking at a sign with a buxom redhead cooing “Y’ALL COME IN NOW” and the cavernous empty space behind her.

An old man sat on a bench, packing items in a box. The Trading Post is a junk store, or in local parlance, an “antique mall.” I am always buying crap — excuse me, treasures — at antique malls. The Trading Post was king of the road.

“We’re closed.”

“Today?”

“Forever,” the owner said. He sounded like he didn’t want to talk about it. “If you’d come earlier, you could have gone to the retirement sale. Now we’re done. Two generations. My father’s store.”

“I used to come here,” I said. “Not looking for anything in particular, just looking for a place to look around.”

The man looked bored. Unlike his wares, I was interchangeable.

“Not much to look at now,” he said, and motioned to the door, where I exited.

I stood behind rusted gas pumps and gazed skyward at billboards advertising moonshine and moccasins. Like other Route 66 landmarks, The Totem Pole Trading Post borrowed Native American iconography as the road tore apart indigenous lands. *

It might have felt like poetic justice that I’d found it shuttered on Indigenous People’s Day. But it didn’t. It felt like wandering into a wound.

The Americana icon had collapsed so gradually, no one noticed. Maybe no one was left to spread the word. Maybe I’d have known if one local newspaper, The Riverfront Times, hadn’t replaced its staff with AI robots and the other, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, hadn’t downsized into a shadow of its former self.

Antique malls sell serendipity and safeguard memory. There’s no organization, no order, no internet — just life after death. Bound books and free spirits: a return to the past, where possibility lives now that the future has been stolen.

I wander halls of history, radio waves tuned to a dead station. Sometimes a ghost plants an object before me, so I know what to do next. These secondhand store specters have been far more useful than my PhD in providing guidance.

I’m not joking. In 2021, I was in Prairie Archives, a sprawling used bookstore in Springfield, Illinois, browsing in a low-key panic. I had a book to write and no clue what to say. I was sick to death of Trump, sick to death of death, and needed a change.

“I’m going to cover my eyes,” I told my kids. “You two walk me through the store and put me in front of a shelf. Whatever page of the book I open, that’s what my next book is about.”

They did as they were told, guiding me through the maze of aisles and spinning me around for good measure. Eyes closed, I grabbed a book, opened it, and exclaimed “Oh, fuck!”

It was a Hunter S. Thompson essay collection from the 1980s. The page I landed on was about Donald Trump and Iran-Contra villain Adnan Khashoggi.

I bought it and spent the rest of 2021 writing They Knew, a book about real conspiracies from the 1980s and how they are marketed as “conspiracy theories” so facts are never found and justice is never served.

Missouri has no shortage of junk stores. But I wonder what I would have found at the Trading Post if I’d gotten there in time. Maybe something to tell me what to do, because I sure as hell don’t know when my country is dying the same way. No fanfare, no pinpoint. Slow and steady surrender, bit by bit — murder disguised as death.

Murdering the United States until it is so unrecognizable, even the mementos are gone.

 

Read more

The “Dark Ambition” of Trump Would “Eat Your Dreams”

by