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America used to be a leader. Trump turned it into a no-show.
While Rick Bright was in the process of filing what promises to be a damning whistleblower complaint to the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services, Trump announced that he was firing the inspector general, Christi Grimm. https://interc.pt/2W1jxnW
Go work for the man you adore.
Front line health care workers, 'essential' workers, first responders - YOU HAVE OUR SUPPORT!
Never the ARMED WHITE DOMESTIC TERRORISTS who are simply tools for the WEALTHY 1% and jeopardize the lives of others by their failures to wear FACE MASKS.
At Dissent, a conversation amongst ex-conservatives on why they left the right.
—Erika
—Erika
Matthew Sitman: I want to start by asking how your experiences as former conservatives have shaped your understanding of the last few years, particularly the rise of Donald Trump.
Maximillian Alvarez: There are two things I’d focus on. One is darker, the other a little more hopeful.
We’re having this conversation in the middle of the primaries, and like many other people on the left I’ve been watching the Democratic establishment lose its mind over Bernie Sanders. And I have to admit, I’ve been getting quite a high off the schadenfreude of it all. It reminds me of how as a conservative growing up in Southern California, a place that also bred ghouls like [Senior Advisor to the President] Stephen Miller, I bought into this proto-Trumpian ethos of trolling as the ultimate political good: “owning the libs” as the guiding principle of my politics, which is in effect a kind of gross political nihilism. I remember the high I got from offending the progressive sensibilities of my classmates, teachers, even members of my family. I also remember how vapid and empty it felt in the long run. The only way to sustain that kind of high is to keep trolling people. And those of us on the left today need to be very careful not to fall into the trap of trolling for its own sake.
On the lighter side, growing up conservative gave me an appreciation for political organizing and politics in general. I remember what it was like to leave the right and find a home on the left. I remember the material conditions, the cultural conditions, and especially the interpersonal conditions that had to be in place for me to change—the ways that people treated me, the ways we approached each other. And that very much inflects the way I approach politics today.
Sarah Jones: Coming from a very conservative Christian background, from a very conservative rural place, I wasn’t totally shocked that Trump won in 2016. Growing up that way didn’t bestow prophetic powers on me. I still thought Clinton was probably going to eke it out in the end. But I wasn’t shocked. And I especially wasn’t shocked that white evangelicals ended up mostly voting for Trump. He embodies a lot of tendencies that I saw in evangelicalism while I was growing up, including an implicit strain of white nationalism. Evangelicals are used to making excuses for people in power, so the fact that Trump had been married multiple times, the fact that he’d had affairs, the fact that he spoke crudely of women wasn’t necessarily going to stop them from supporting him. What mattered were the things he said and the things that he stood for. Pro-life tendencies in white evangelicalism often disguise fears of demographic replacement. Trump played on those fears brilliantly.
The joy in “owning the libs” that Max talked about was also a factor. Pundits who said the crudeness of Trump’s language would be a turn-off for born-again believers really underestimated the degree to which evangelicals—with some important exemptions—were used to speaking of the enemy in really cruel terms if they felt that was merited. You heard it most often when the topic of discussion was LGBTQ people. The terms that people would use were just heinous. The way they would talk about women who had abortions was dehumanizing. The evangelicals that were part of my circles would say that what I now see as cruelty was just the truth; God’s facts don’t care about your feelings.
Another thing I’ve been thinking about was the tendency in the 1990s for evangelicals to link God with the free market, which led to the idea that if you were following God, he would reward you. They wouldn’t necessarily say, “I believe in the prosperity gospel.” In my world, that was viewed as more of a Pentecostal thing. But there wasn’t much of a difference in the belief systems. And the result is a movement that tends to worship power and worship prosperity, which amounts to worshipping capitalism.
These tendencies in the Christian right create an opportunity for the left to have an impact that liberalism can’t. Income inequality in the United States hit a fifty-year high last year. If that keeps up, the Christian right’s subservience to profit-making is going to be as unsustainable as its dehumanizing beliefs about LGBTQ people. That was certainly a big part of why I was drawn to the left.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: I was at UC–Berkeley the night Trump was elected. I’ll never forget the pandemonium that broke out on campus. I had two or three roommates that entered a state of shock. I was scheduled to give a talk the next day, and it was canceled. If I recall correctly, the counseling centers at Berkeley were overbooked for weeks.
I grew up in the panhandle of Florida, with a lot of people who would go on to be Trump supporters. I was raised in a charismatic Pentecostal context. Everyone in my family voted for Trump, including my mom, who married a black man. (My father is black, my mother is white.) So backing Trump wasn’t just about race. The church that I went to was nondenominational and multi-ethnic—like many charismatic churches since the 1970s. In fact, there were a remarkable number of interracial marriages that came out of this movement.
All of this put me in a strange position. My friends at Berkeley were terrified. Books from people like Timothy Snyder were warning about a return of fascism. But the people I grew up with in the panhandle still seemed very nice to me. I had long ago rejected their politics, but I never thought of them in the terms that centrists or liberals now did. I had to do some soul-searching about how I was raised and whether I should have seen something like this coming. And I suppose it shouldn’t have been that surprising. I take Sarah’s point about the importance of white nationalism, but I also think about people like my Mom, who just voted for Trump because she’s pro-life, and she’s not going to compromise on that.
I was being told by many of my academic colleagues that people I love and cared about a lot were racists, and I knew that not all of them were. And I also knew that since the financial crisis, a lot of the churches in the panhandle had shut down.
My identity as someone on the left became much more refined. I already knew what conservatives stood for, and I had left that world. But Trump’s election made me feel that there was a real disconnect between mainstream liberalism and what’s going on in wide swathes of the country. And that disconnect has been a crucial part of the emergence of a real left in this country.
Where are their RUSSIAN SUPPORTERS?
Meanwhile some good news:
"The NRA, which boasts about 5 million members, in recent weeks laid off or furloughed dozens of employees, imposed a four-day workweek for some employees and cut salaries across the board, including for CEO Wayne LaPierre. The financial issues, combined with the cancellation of fundraisers and the national convention, which would have surely drawn a visit from President Trump, have complicated its ability to influence the 2020 election. "
"The NRA, which boasts about 5 million members, in recent weeks laid off or furloughed dozens of employees, imposed a four-day workweek for some employees and cut salaries across the board, including for CEO Wayne LaPierre. The financial issues, combined with the cancellation of fundraisers and the national convention, which would have surely drawn a visit from President Trump, have complicated its ability to influence the 2020 election. "
LINK
When it comes down to it, people are not ok with their rights being taken away. #VoteByMail #DefendDemocracy
Expecting reasonable, sensible solutions from REPUBLICANS....?
