Grump Is To Blame
"As we careen toward Election Day in a week, the day’s news is replete with reminders that Donald Trump continues to be a singular threat to a free and fair elections. The complexity of the threat matrix – political violence, foreign interference, conspiracy theories, the Big Lie – can obscure that Trump plays a critical role in all of them as instigator, inciter, conspiracist, accelerant, and useful idiot.
For nearly a decade now, Trump has radicalized American politics and personally served as a catalyst for the worst impulses, extremism, and violence that have afflicted the public square. He has created, sustained, and nourished a crazed political atmosphere which pushes lone wolf actors over the edge. He has summoned and rallied a crowd of insurrectionists and turned them loose against the legislative branch in order to remain in power. He has dipped into Nazi rhetoric, dehumanized entire peoples and nationalities, trafficked in the most racist tropes, and treated women like trash. He has taken a sledgehammer to democratic institutions and the principles upon which they are based."
The Cowardice of the Elites
"The Amazon king is not alone in this consequential abdication of responsibility. Numerous folks in the ruling class have cowardly ducked and covered in this election that could determine whether our imperfect democracy slides toward fascism. JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon, who previously referred to Trump’s post-2020 election conduct as “treason,” privately supports Harris. But according to the New York Times, he won’t say so publicly “because he’s fearful that if Mr. Trump is victorious, he could retaliate against the people and companies who publicly opposed his run.” Billionaire Bill Gates has privately donated $50 million to a nonprofit that supports Harris, but he has not (as of this writing) publicly endorsed her. He won’t put his mouth where his money is. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who organized fundraisers for Barack Obama in 2012 and campaigned for Hillary Clinton in 2016 (denouncing Trump), announced he won’t take a position on the 2024 race.
Last week, Fortune looked at the 10 richest people in the United States and discovered that none of them had publicly expressed a preference between Trump and Harris, except for Elon Musk, the No. 1 on the list, who has become Trump’s top (and manic) cheerleader, pouring tens of millions of dollars—perhaps hundreds of millions—into efforts to elect Trump. (See my recent article on how Musk is essentially providing Trump $100 million worth of free advertising on X, the social media platform he owns.) This roster of chickens includes Buffet, Gates, Bezos, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison (a longtime GOP donor), former Google CEO Larry Page, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
These plutocrats amassed fortunes in America, yet they now will not publicly oppose a convicted felon and fraudster who was found liable for sexual assault, who attempted to subvert the constitutional order when he was last in office, who has expressed support and admiration for overseas dictators, and who has voiced fascistic sentiments, including proposing military tribunals and criminal prosecutions for his political foes, the suspension of the Constitution for his own benefit, and loyalty oaths (to him) for government workers."
David Corn @ Our Land/Mother Jones (I get an email newsletter but can't link it for some reason.)
What strikes me here is another connection to the major media. CNN reports on the regular, I heard it again reported this way just today, and I imagine the nightly network news broadcasts more or less repeat the same, and that is "voters trust Harris more on women's issues and democracy and Trump more on immigration and economics." I've shared before that serious polling does not support the contention that the general public or electorate trusts Trump more on the economy. Significant majorities know Trump and the republicans favor rich corporations and stiff labor whenever they can. But as indicated above the rich people who own the major media do quite obviously trust Trump over Harris on the economy. Why? Because they don't want to pay more taxes or deal with more environmental regulations, same as it ever was. But, especially, they don't want to face four more years of Lina Khan's antitrust, which is to be clear good economics for small businesses and consumers but bad economics for monopolists and Billionaires.
The Resistance Demands Respect, Too
"These liberals [including 200,000 that have canceled WaPo subscriptions] are signaling that they’ve reached their breaking point with institutions that coddle extremists; that fear holding enemies of democracy to any consistent standard; that would rather head off bad-faith attacks than do what’s right. They believe, quite rightly, that these impulses are the reason Trump is not currently in prison. They know Republicans won’t check him or hold him accountable, but they aren’t willing to underwrite a system where journalists and Democrats and prosecutors and judges and union and corporate leaders won’t either.
In other words, they want the Trump era to be well and truly over. For the moment that mostly means beating him next week. But in a longer-run sense it means changing incentives so that leaders stop tolerating or caving to the extortionate tactics that define Trump’s [and corporate rule's] authoritarianism."
VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE!
And beyond Trump, he couldn't do this all alone after all, who is most responsible for the US being on the precipice of a violent fascist catastrophe? Dishonor roll:
Republican Party
MAGA
SCOTUS and legal system
Billionaires (aka Oligarchy)
Wall Street
Violent militias and police unions and gun nuts
Major media (Fox is a national security threat at this point but NY Times and WaPo and NPR have been "bothsidesing" mealy-mouthed terrible as well)
Social media (turns out it doesn't expand free speech so much as blow-up fake news and disinformation)
Sinclair Broadcast Group
Putin and Trump's other foreign dictator besties
Legacy of paranoid style and violent bigotry in American history (Lost Cause, etc)
Crooked business hustlers
Special hell reserved for academic and activist lefties and Third Party morons rooting for Trump to hasten the revolution
People without college educations, which I hesitate to pick-on because this is my own family origins, and I generally root for populist movements in history, but Trump is a treasonous, hateful, and embarrassingly dumb low in the history of American populism, or in my life time at the very least.
Again, VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! to save America!
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