On this day [August 5] in 1965, the Voting Rights Act became law. It became such a fundamental part of our legal system that Congress repeatedly reauthorized it, by large margins, as recently as 2006.
But in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts struck down the provision of the law requiring that states with histories of voter discrimination get approval from the Department of Justice before they changed their voting laws. Immediately, the legislatures of those states, now dominated by Republicans, began to pass measures to suppress the vote. In the wake of the 2020 election, Republican-dominated states increased the rate of voter suppression, and on July 1, 2021, the Supreme Court permitted such suppression with the Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee decision.
A little case history for calling this the worst SCOTUS in US history:
DC v. Heller, 2008: Declares for first time Second Amendment protects individual right to bear arms.
Citizen's United v. FEC, 2010: Spurs latest orgy of super PACs and dark money in politics.
Shelby County v. Holder, 2013: Guts Voting Rights Act protections against racial discrimination.
Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, 2022: Strips women of individual reproductive rights.
Trump v. United States, 2024: Court gives immunity to POTUS as long as what they do can be construed as part of their "official duties," which then somehow exempted Jan 6 and trying to change votes in Georgia and refusing to relinquish top secret national security documents, etc. So, in other words, POTUS is now above the law.
There's more but this list is enough to make the case, if you ask me. Republicans, with McConnell and Trump in starring roles, packed the Robert's Court with conservative ideologues and we are now living with the results: fascist, Christian nationalist, plutocratic rule in America. The blueprint: Project 2025. Only rivals, possibly, Taney Court 1836 to 1864, setting up the Civil War, or the Waite Court 1874 to 1888, basically, undermining the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution.
On the one hand world history is an endless chronicle of growth, war and conquest, technological achievement and empire, a multi millennia long conspiracy of the rich against the poor, the strong preying on the weak. But it is also, simultaneously, if much less documented, many big and small resistances to tyranny, enslavement, and whatever rat race traps rule the day, resistance and especially the cooperation to endure and escape various forms of violent domination.
You might call the former, in terms of historiography, the stories we tell about history, the conservative materialist, empirical (always counting the money), Winners theory of history, with its preoccupation with the preservation of already-existing wealth accumulation and associated social advantages and the real and perceived threats to those advantages, and the latter resistance, a liberating Loser's theory of history, the secret history of the "Woke ideology" of whatever day, promising uplift, expanding civil rights, more community, more freedom and equality, rooted historically in the modern period in the American and French Revolutions at the end of the 18th century but also, both theories really, present in every Chinese peasant revolt and Protestant Reformation or any large human migration going back to Mesopotamia and Egypt (3500 BCE), at least.
Perhaps to the former we owe winning wars and military domination or empire. But to the latter, to which I am particularly partial as a working stiff, we owe our right to vote and our living wages, such as they are, what human rights protections we do enjoy, and the freakin' weekend, which I'm pretty sure is universally popular. Resistance is Sisyphean, endlessly contested and compromising, and no stupid dictatorship or AI automation will end this essentially negotiated and fought over perpetual feature of human societies.
Anyway, two historical takes on the Grump Era published last year that I've found perhaps weirdly unsettling and comfortin. Both include big picture perspectives and comparisons that resonate with today's political crisis. They've helped me and I thought might you too.
Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise To Power, by Timothy W. Ryback (2024): What rhymes? The way the business people don't really like Hitler but prefer him to the socialists and communists and think, with no little conceit, they can manage him. Also, Hitler's delusions of grandeur ring with Grump's; even if their class origins are very different: Hitler a patriot veteran and Grump the playboy business tycoon. Hitler's supremely confident with winning 37% of the popular vote because he reasons 37% is 75% of a simple majority; this kind of strategic delusional thinking seems Trumpian somehow. All of Hitler's people, Goebbels, Goring, Himmler, etc, by contrast, harbor constant fears the party is on the verge of collapse. By Hitler's logic Grump really did win a huge mandate, although he didn't even win a majority of the popular vote, beating Harris by only 1.5%, and recent reporting indicates he was the beneficiary of a bunch of voter suppression, which the red states and districts have been working diligently at since 2021. Also, the Night of the Long Knives of 1934 casts an ominous shadow over the present Blitzkrieg of illiberalism, to say the least.
When The Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, by John Ganz (2024): All the original founders of the social conservative elite panic known as the Contract with America are here. It's 1993. It's the same old song, really. From the Powell Memorandum of 1971 all the way to the "Flight 93 Election" theory of 2016, where have we heard this before: The Democrats have to be stopped, they're destroying the country, if they aren't stopped the country will be lost forever to socialist health care and sex scandals or whatever X bigot issue is riling up the illiberal mob in whatever given election. Much of it fueled by a slow burning desperation about demographic changes white supremacists can't stop, hence the desperation part. Actually, the "mixed" population on the census, which, mind you, is 70-80% white mixed with some other race/ethnicity category and is likely to remain a super-majority for the rest of the century, isn't supposed to surpass whites-only until 2044, but Maga are already wetting their pants and more people will be hurt because they feel like they're losing their country because the kid taking their order at the Burger King drive-thru speaks English with a difficult to follow accent. Ganz explores in molecular detail the conservative ferment triggered by these changes and the waning potential of the so-called Reagan Revolution in the 1992 election. Talk about fever swamps, like with Rick Perlstein I'm both awed and a little frightened by the insider baseball depths Ganz gets into rightwing spaces I have to heavily filter. But I'm also grateful, he's a very able guide, historically searching, tremendous attention to the details of the historical record, and a sly sense of humor. I still think culturally the best way to understand Grump is as a Frankenstein creation of the neoliberal yuppie greed-is-good '80s, the decade before Ganz's focus, but my Grump is a monster without a constituency or cult. What Ganz is really getting into here is the making of Grump's base and cult. And what a story it is! More clown show charlatans than you can shake a stick at: Ross Perot, Patrick Buchanan, Ruby Ridge (the event, not any one person), and all the rest.
Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Niles Rodgers, and the Allman Brothers Band's favorite POTUS. And my first vote for a president, although I cannot say I paid too close attention to President Carter's term in office and the year I voted for him in 1980 he actually lost. In retrospect based mostly on the account in Walter Karp's Liberty Under Siege (1989), I've always understood Carter's presidency as this decent guy who wasn't up to the big money hardball politics going on in Washington. I believed the 1980 October Surprise theory from the first time I heard it. It was like a coup de grace to Carter's term in office, Reagan and Beltway insiders stealing his lunch money. The way Carter's humanitarian strengths and integrity blossomed and flourished after his presidency has only seemed to corroborate Karp's take. Carter's humility and honesty and generosity were his superpowers, and traits not tolerated much in the special interest meat grinder of the halls of government. Carter lived a century but the timing of his passing might be a mercy in that he won't have to see what comes next for the country and maybe the loss of a politician and leader like him might raise the alarm a little about the peril the country is facing as the result of the recent election. Wonder how the Carter Center would have assessed the integrity of the US election as official observers, as they have done other elections all around the world? What might they have had to say about the Russian bomb scares and Musk's billions flooding the zone with disinformation down the stretch? I've never really thought much about Carter as the rock & roll POTUS, or until the documentary of the same name came out in 2020 anyway. But I do remember Hunter S. Thompson loved him. And I remember he was the first president to walk in an inaugural parade and he put solar panels on the roof of the Whitehouse. And I can't remember ever seeing any other president in a fan t-shirt for a rock & roll band like he appears in the doc in one for The Allman Bros. Also in the doc Carter says the first artists he thought of inviting to play at his inauguration were Paul Simon and Aretha Franklin; not exactly Elvis and Tina Turner but rock & roll-ish enough. By comparison, I think Reagan was still into the Rat Pack. The Bushies were into country music, reportedly. Clinton was into Fleetwood Mac and played the saxophone. Obama was always doing playlists like he was a rock critic. Biden tried to follow suit but his heart wasn't in it so his lists came off even cringier than Obama's. And before Carter, according to the internet, Gerald Ford was a jazz fan and Nixon only listened to Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries with the volume set to 11, just kidding. And Grump appears to like all rock and pop music only once it's been played to death, bloated, and bad. So it is Jimmy Carter: The Rock & Roll President. RIP.
Addendum: Several of my favorite journalists are pointing out in the wake of Carter's passing that features of the neoliberal order, conventionally attributed to Reagan winning in 1980, actually got going under Carter. I've been aware of this case for awhile but always bristled at the argument.
Deregulating the trucking industry isn't the same as making opposition to all regulations and taxes on wealth official admin policy or making regulations and taxes anti-growth curse words. Neolib boilerplate: Government interventions in the economy-- i.e., taxes and regulations-- are bad, always bad, and should always be scorned and condemned. The only thing equally bad is government spending that might require more taxes and regulations.
Although, in historical fact, various gov regulations and taxes protecting labor, public health, and the environment have been around for over a hundred years and are essential to the general prosperity and peace of society. They are essential to keeping the food we eat and the air we breathe from poisoning and killing us. It's that basic. Sure, Carter was into Christian austerity but also into lots of Christian charity. Keep it simple: Milton Friedman, Mr. Neoliberal Austerity Economics, advised Reagan and dissed Carter.
Anyway, drives me crazy how people in politics can get so self-servingly binary about this stuff. Deregulating anything equals Neoliberalism. No it doesn't. Cutting any waste in government is austerity. No, cutting essential social safety net spending in the caring economy or cutting spending on public infrastructure is austerity. And, actually, regressive taxes on the bottom 50% of income earners ought to be cut and progressive taxes on exorbitant wealth hoarding ought to be increased. So I can get a little defensive about this argument that Carter was a Neolib. Still, have to concede some points on the matter to this passage from Tim Barker substack post @ Origins of Our Time:
By 1984, Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s top domestic policy adviser, could already describe the former president’s most important legacy as “taking the Democrats into the post-New Deal era.” This meant “supporting fiscal moderation and less government intrusion in the economy — a philosophy of government that some now describe as ‘neo-liberal.’”
Who knows Eizenstat's intentions four years into the Reagan Revolution but point taken. As a heart breaking example of Carter's "fiscal moderation" and austerity turns out he recommended cutting social security. I know, a different time, stagflation, the gov had to do something. But by punishing the elderly poor? This doesn't taint his Habitat for Humanity home building work but it does put it possibly in a new light? Building homes for the poor as penance?
Anyway, Carter's takes on the infamous 2010 Citizen's United Supreme Court ruling allowing billionaires and Big Business to spend literally as much as they want promoting austerity and sabotaging our democracy adds perspective. Compiled by Public Citizen:
Citizens United is an “erroneous ruling” and “the most stupid decision the Supreme Court ever made.”
Citizens United has turned America into an “oligarchy with unlimited political bribery.”
Citizens United “violates the essence” of our democracy and represents “the biggest change in America” since I was elected in 1976.
Citizens United has left everyday Americans “cheated out of” the chance to make their lives better.
Citizens United has led to “a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.”
To corporate rule neoliberalism means maximizing capital wealth accumulation for the oligarchy and austerity budgets for everyone else. Jimmy Carter was NOT a Neoliberal. His Christian austerity was an equal opportunity austerity.
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—Going forward, ABC News will have a “zero tolerance policy for news,” the CEO of parent company Disney said at an all-hands meeting on Thursday.
“In recent days, I’ve heard troubling reports of ABC News employees recklessly dabbling in news,” Bob Iger told the gathering at ABC’s Manhattan headquarters. “This ends now.”
Declaring ABC News “a news-free zone,” he said, “If you find yourself tempted to do news, I want you to ask yourself: is it worth risking your career?”
Iger’s anti-news policy, however, drew a harsh rebuke from Fox News Channel, who claimed that ABC was infringing on its brand.
Is Slacker rock like this vintage now or is it maybe eternal, Dad rock nostalgia, or a lingering bohemian fantasy of life without work or the hard un-fun kind of work anyway? When the first Slacker movie came out in '91 rents were still cheap, flop houses and flopping on couches plentiful enough, and squats were always around, so urbanites could get by with minimal work and maximum hanging out or 'slacking' to make their art or party or just hang out! In the 20th century, anyway, the arts thrived in the cities on the accessibility of cheap housing and relevantly decent paid work and/or maximum free time to make art, which, yes, a lot of times still looked like people just hanging out like slackers and partying. But do such slacker conditions even exist today? Rents are so high. MJ Lenderman, guitar, vocals, member of North Carolina standard bearing indie rockers, Wednesday, made the Number 1 record on my favorite NY-er music writer's Best Albums of 2024, and is why I'm here, basically. If nothing else, I'll be damned if MJL is not heroically still living out the slacker code in 2024 somehow someway one someday at a time. And let me tell you I've fallen for my share of records in the Slacker rock vein over the years: Sparklehorse. Waxahatchee. Courtney Barnett. Car Seat Headrest. Even a Bon Iver song! But rarely does the mopey slacker vibe alone make me a follower of these semi-industrious artists and their semi-pop music. What keeps me coming back in the following, "Rudolph," for example, is the alt-country riff-rock crescendoing guitar chorus that whips, momentarily, like a strong wind, the slacker longing and regret into something like catharsis, like a full-throated sing-along with some old friends, warm and familiar, if also sad and wistful. Tis the season for year-end record lists! Enjoy.
"The rollercoaster saga of Eminem and Debbie exemplifies the way in which hip-hop is perhaps surprisingly rich with empathetic songs about struggling mothers. Even when artists reveal difficult truths – like Biggie sharing his mom’s cancer diagnosis with the world on Suicidal Thoughts, or underground hero Boldy James complaining of being neglected by the woman of the house on Mommy Dearest – it tends to culminate in a moment that reveals a touching respect, or the mending of a broken relationship.
It’s the genre where working class men come to grapple with complex relationships with the women who gave birth to them – like Debbie and Marshall Mathers. While the road might be rocky and painful memories are likely to be excavated, rappers (and by extension their fans, who feel “seen” by the lyrics) that immortalise their mothers in music tend to walk away with much lighter shoulders."
“When you look at [my jersey in the rafters], well I guess you’ll be thinking of me,” she said. “But just know that every time I look at that number, I’m gonna see you. I’m gonna see every pride flag, and every trans flag, and every Black Lives Matter flag, and every equal pay flag, and every ‘Fuck Portland’ flag. And I’m gonna see purple hair and pink hair and a short stint of blue hair. And I’m gonna see families that I feel like I grew up with…. So just know that when you’re looking up and thinking about me, I’m looking up and thinking about all of you, and all of the incredible moments that we shared.”
I've never been and don't know much about soccer (other than that I find the Vuvuzela even more annoying than the baseball/football stadium Wave, which they probably do at soccer too) but salute, and a big Yay, for Megan Rapinoe! And also Sue Bird, right in pic, who played for the Storm, Seattle's most successful sports franchise this century, and who recently got a street named after her.
Or, of course they did, since several of its members have already been taking such 'gifts' and 'gratuities', reportedly worth millions, for awhile now.
Had to take my car in for service at a dealer the other day and found all the software systems were down and they were doing everything by pen and paper. The service guy said they'd been down for over a week and likely could be down for a few weeks more. A Russian hacker group called BlackSuit is behind the attack, apparently, it's nation wide, no doubt part of Russia's ongoing attack on our economy and elections, and also as it turns out part of the monopolizing private equity termite economics Matt Stoller has been chronicling for awhile now:
Monopolization and vulnerabilities to hacking go together, because monopolies produce poor quality software. And that’s the story with CDK Global and Reynolds [the auto industry data software firms recently hacked and shutdown]. The whole crisis was avoidable, because there were possible entrants into the market that could have forced them to offer better software at cheaper prices. “Anybody who knows anything about the conduct of American business,” historian Richard Hofstadter noted in 1964, “knows that the managers of the large corporations do their business with one eye constantly cast over their shoulders at the antitrust division.”
That’s no longer true. And Wood and Easterbrook, dancing to the tune of Scalia, butchered antitrust law, which led to CDK Global’s investment in lawyers instead of quality assurance engineers. And so now people can’t buy cars.
Bigger backdrop to this monopolizing private equity nightmare we find ourselves in:
Schumpeter hated antitrust law, arguing in his 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy that antitrust was foolish for two reasons. First, monopolists were inherently checked by the ever present potential of disruptive new technology. “A monopoly position is in general no cushion to sleep on,” he wrote, defending then-monopolist Alcoa in its ongoing antitrust litigation. “As it can be gained, so it can be retained only by alertness and energy.” And second, monopolies were the entities who delivered innovation precisely because their market power afforded them the luxury of long-term planning and investment. Big business is “the most powerful engine of progress… not only in spite of, but to a considerable extent through, this strategy which looks so restrictive when viewed in the individual case.”
The logic from Schumpeter to Trinko is direct. And yet, it’s also quite obviously wrong. From Boeing to Too Big to Fail banks, many examples, far beyond the CDK Global and Reynolds situation, where incumbents used their consolidated position to hinder innovation and lower quality, shows that Schumpeter’s thinking about commerce is both old and odd.
In other words, again, it is not the case that free markets, unfettered markets, maximize technological innovation but in fact in an effort to gain and secure market share often discourage or undermine innovation.
Last Thursday, June 20, MLB held a game at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama, billed as the oldest professional ballpark in the US, between the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals. The game was played to honor the recent passing of baseball great Willie Mays and the Negro League baseball that was once played at Rickwood. Reggie Jackson, along with other old baseball greats, spoke to the Fox Sports crew to honor Willie and the occasion. But Reggie, in his remarks, lingered on what a racist and cruelly segregated place Rickwood and Birmingham were when he played there in the 1960s and thanked his white teammates, and friends, who helped him through it. It's primary source history racists would prefer was glossed over and forgotten and an old but still flinty Jackson telling it like is. All respect for Mr. October.
"That is why it is illuminating that sports media in the United States is so quiet in the face of the biggest story in the world: Israel’s war on the civilians of Gaza. It is not like there is a shortage of sports angles. We have an organization, Athletes for a Ceasefire, whose members will give interviews and talk about what’s happening. We have Israel killing top-level Palestinian players and Olympic coaches. We have the push to ban Israel from the Olympics and World Cup. We have the Palestinian National Women’s Soccer Team traveling to Ireland, where they were feted as heroes. We have Palestinian teams playing amid unimaginable hardship and carnage. The stories are there for those who want to tell them. Instead the most recent article on Gaza on ESPN’s website is from five months ago, and it’s just a reprint of an Associated Press story about an Israeli soccer player who was “investigated” by Turkish authorities for trying to raise awareness about the hostages while on the pitch. That’s it."
One reason media ignore the story is because reporters, academics, people are getting canceled for supporting the civilians of Gaza or criticizing Israel. Zirin knows this. He's Jewish, which adds to his perspective. Some rightwing pol in Israel yesterday called Jewish street protesters against the Netanyahu gov part of "Hamas." For crying out loud, Greil Marcus was calling college protesters in the US agents of Hamas. Needless to say, speaking up for Gazans or speaking out against Israel's war, on any kind of sizable platform (social media, etc), takes courage.
After two spins I admire Cowboy Carter more than anything. Bold Move. Like the lady says, "this isn't a country album, it's a Beyonce album." She's an unstoppable Blue Wave and looks good in a cowboy hat. And I do quite like this song, and if country radio doesn't that's maybe because they're sexist and racist but definitely because they have lousy taste. Bey and Miley's voices wind around each other, lovingly, urgently, in a sweet country-tinged duet; tinged as in "Wild Horses" or "If It Makes You Happy." Miley sounds ancient. All Stevie Nick's shawls rain from the sky, Bey and Miley dancing and singing together, they are forever and ever for each other. In the right moment tears flow.
Extra weird when your peer age group, or big brother age group anyway, start passing. All the Walton highlights I saw on ESPN this evening were late in his career when he played a supporting role for the Celtics. Before that, when he was still just a big hippie kid, he led the Portland Trail Blazers to their first and only NBA Championship in 1977.
I wanted to attend the deciding game that year. I'd already been to an earlier playoff game, where the crowd energy was incredible, a first for me and not like anything I'd experienced before. But the final game landed on my high school graduation day. I actually remember wavering about going to the game instead but tradition, or my parents, more like it, won out. At our grad ceremony many of us were packing radios and a cheer broke out as we were marching into the stadium. The Blazers beat the 76ers! It remains about the only thing I remember from that day.
Walton played like an all-time great NBA big man his first four seasons in Portland before injuries seriously limited his career. He came out of UCLA, which was dominant in college hoops in those days. He had one of those John Wooden bank shots. Textbook footwork. And, above all, he was a great team player and a special passer. Watching Walton snare a rebound and whip an outlet pass to a streaking Blazer, Lionel Hollins, Bobby Gross, Johnny Davis, etc, already near or past half court was a thing of beauty. Showtime before the '80s Lakers.
My closest brush with Walton, though, had come a couple years before, maybe 1975, one of my very first concerts, Commander Cody and the His Lost Planet Airmen and New Riders of the Purple Sage, at the old Paramount Theater in Portland. It was in the basement bathroom, the reefer smoke thick as fog, but there he was in all his long bushy red hair and headband Grateful Dead hippie glory, two or three urinals down, no one else around. I gushed "Big Bill Walton!" or something like that because I was startled, and excitable like that, and probably high as a kite. Walton chuckled, issued me a friendly 'hey,' and sauntered out, like a giant wizard amongst us silly Hobbits of the Shire.
“Fury Road” appeared more than two years before #MeToo took hold in the entertainment industry, and its decrying of sexual violence now feels uncannily prescient for Hollywood. So does the figure of Furiosa herself, who, unlike some of the regulation Strong Female Characters that have since rolled off the studios’ comic-book-movie assembly lines, never seemed like a cynical bid for representational cred. She reads like a character who had to exist and who may, in fact, have always existed, just waiting for the right story—and the right actress—to break her loose."
I've heard gossip about later lives but I'll always remember Albini as this obsessive for a perfect punk rock sound. I read him first as a budding rock critic writing in this small magazine, Matter, often obsessing about DIY studio recording his favorite noise. The rest was fucking around, pre-internet trolling effective now and then (funny and/or poignant; "Bad Penny," etc) but mostly tedious and annoying. His nerd punk voice sounds cornier now. But his punk rock/noise rock sound still packs a punch, punishing Roland drums and a mangle of violent guitars, long knives slashing, clashing in a clangorous, grandly horrific, grudge match of killer robots. He'll likely be remembered for records he helped produce more than the records he played on. Surfer Rosa. In Utero. His re-recording of '70s Cheap Trick, by me anyway. But Albini's punk rock sound was the first thing he got straight. Consider "Cables," leading off 1983's Bulldozer, the first Big Black record I heard: Violent, histrionically angry, vaguely sexual in a creepy way, prone to spasmodic outbursts of frustration and derision. A Punk Rock Tuesday honorarium.
Trump is turning to his 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort to advise him in 2024.
An investigation by a Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee into the links between Trump’s campaign and Russia determined that Manafort had shared polling data from the Trump camp with his partner, Konstantin Kilimnik, who the senators assessed was a Russian operative.
Translation: A vote for Trump is a vote for treason, a betrayal of America and selling out the country to Putin, again.
"The fact that millions of Americans have voted to restore Trump to power—after he plotted to overturn an election and incited insurrectionist violence to overthrow the government. After he was twice impeached (and, in the second impeachment, found guilty by a bipartisan Senate majority that fell short of the two-thirds needed for conviction). After he was indicted twice for conspiring to mount a coup, and once for allegedly swiping top-secret documents, and once for paying hush money to a porn star to cover up an alleged extramarital affair. After civil trials found him guilty of massive business fraud and liable for sexual assault and defamation.
Of course, this is not fine. But the nation’s No. 1 problem is that millions view it as acceptable, if not desirable."
This about covers the grinding madness of the moment with a few of my own additional dire observations to add to the fire.
While the "millions" are clearly not a majority of Americans (he's lost popular national elections twice now; thankfully) the millions includes one of the two major political parties, a commanding majority of a stolen SCOTUS, a compliant news media that thrives on his Reality TV dumpster fire theatrics, a number of red state legislatures ready to do whatever it takes to install their Fuehrer and, apparently, significant numbers of law enforcement.
(How significant? Will police unions endorse the most criminal, treasonous, violently fascist candidate for POTUS in history, again?)
This alliance is not just mystifying but terrifying. Pax Americana, with the assistance of hostile foreign dictators, is under assault from within: Racists, corporate monopolists, gun crazy nativists, and Christian nationalist know-nothings want to revive the violent white supremacy of the slave Confederacy. We are not just experiencing deaths of despair and declining lifespans in America but a significant chunk of the country clings to a fascist national death-wish.
Biden should win in a landslide, a total rejection of America's violent bigot past, re-committing the country to multicultural democracy and sustainable growth economics and a better future for all workers and all Americans.
The differences between the parties has never been starker, more clear. But this is what we're up against. See you in November.
