Surrender Not War, Trump Rebukes Kennedy On Vaccines, Rep. Dan Goldman Shares His Thoughts On Where We Are Now (Resend)Leader Schumer to challenge Senate Rs on Trump's terrible tariffsAfternoon all. I end the week convinced that indeed the political landscape did change over the late summer and the fall is now one of opportunity for us. I lay out my case in my new weekly video and post, in a new Deep State Radio discussion with David Rothkopf and Tara McGowan and in this lively conversation with Stuart Stevens of Lincoln Square. (It’s come to our attention that not everyone received this post today. So I am re-sending, and apologize to those who have received it twice. It is a good one so am excited to share it again!) To sum - Trump was knocked off course by Elon’s emasculating attacks on him in early June and despite three months of desperate and manic efforts to right the ship and restore his POWER, STRENGTH and MANHOOD, he and his agenda remain remarkably unpopular and the intensity of the opposition to him has grown. Look at this poll tracker from G. Elliot Morris - Trump was recovering in late May then started declining in early June and has just stayed down, despite the LA and DC occupations, the bombing of Iran, the insane tariffs, the impulsive firing of leaders of the BLS/DIA/the Fed, the passage of the big ugly. Nothing has worked to get it (him) up.
Trump’s political team sees all this data. They see our overperformances in the special and local elections that are currently outpacing their last midterm blowout in 2017-2018. They see their retirements and our top tier recruits. Trump’s team sees the terrible economic data; know the ACA subsidy cuts are going to cause intense pain for tens of millions of people in a few months; have reconciled themselves that the Trump-Epstein affair will continue to damage him despite all their efforts; and are aware that Trump has not delivered on his any of his foreign policy promises and that Putin continues to toss their boss around like a chew toy. Eight months in this Trump thing simply isn’t working, and it is clear that there are voices inside agitating for a course correction. We saw it with their rebranding of the big ugly bill this week, and Thune’s new openness to delaying the ACA subsidy cuts. We saw it with Trump’s pollster going to the weekly lunch of the Senate Rs this week and telling them Kennedy was leading them astray on vaccines. We saw it in the brutal treatment Kennedy got from Republican Senators on Thursday, and we saw it late yesterday afternoon when Trump, shockingly, defending vaccines and seemed to throw Kennedy (and DeSantis too) under the bus. Watch this:  As we say here little cracks can become big cracks, little wins can become big wins, and courage can become contagious. This thing just isn’t working as they planned; they know it and struggling to find a new path; and we need to be very, very aggressive now for in their flailing is opportunity. Central to their struggle is the challenging they are having in the packaging of Trump as a strongman “Commander-In-Chief.” He has failed to impose his will on the Ukraine and Gaza wars. His “90 trade deals in 90 days” was an extraordinary failure, and his destructive tariffs have dramatically weakened both him and the US across the world. In this remarkable post yesterday our leader acknowledged what a catastrophe his foreign policy has been.
The public rejected his LA occupation and are deeply unhappy with his mass deportation strategy. The DC occupation was branded as “fighting crime” but that too has been rejected by the American people. So where we seem to be heading this week is to directing our military to the only place where Trump still has support from the public - border security and “protecting the homeland” - despite the historic increases in funding the part of our government ALREADY RESPONSIBLE for this - DHS - will be receiving in the coming years. A new story in Politico, Pentagon plan prioritizes homeland over China threat, helps explain what is going on:
In a new must-read article in the Atlantic Anne Applebaum aptly uses the word “surrender” to describes this new strategy of pulling back from challenging Russia and China and defending democracy - and American interests - throughout the world. Just so we connect with the strategic confusion, desperation and idiocy here at the very time the Trump regime is attempting to pull back our military from the global stage to “protect the homeland” Trump is changing the Pentagon’s name from the Department of Defense (protecting the homeland) to the Department of War (against whom? 11 unarmed guys in a boat?).
Look at this new Twitter post from DHS. Now ICE is fighting the drug war? Try to make sense of all this. It’s a dangerous and unacceptable level of buffoonery.
I tried to make sense of all this yesterday and stumbled on this article in the right-leaning magazine The Spectator, Inside Trump’s war on the cartels, that generated this fascistic ICE image, above. As background it is worth a read, but these two paragraphs were my favorite as they turn our ongoing efforts to surrender to Russia and China into a “strategic doctrine” -
Ah yes, that glorious 19th century Trump so often wistfully talks about, an era with no income taxes but lots of tariffs, no vaccines, when men were men, blacks enslaved, those Mexicans were in Mexico, and women knew their place. This stuff, which apparently is really driving the emerging foreign policy of the United States of America, is as delusional, fanatical and dangerous as Kennedy’s attempt to unravel our nation’s vaccine regime; and we, my friends, will have to fight it as just as hard as we the terrible tariffs, Kennedy, and their war on science, higher education and public health. For what America is getting from Trump is not war but surrender. Leader Schumer Commits To Challenge Trump’s Terrible Tariffs This Fall - From The Hill:
Can we all say Amen!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
More on this encouraging development soon. My New Interview With Rep. Dan Goldman - I sat down yesterday with one of our most compelling emerging Congressional leaders, Rep. Dan Goldman of New York. A recording and transcript is above. It is a wide ranging discussion, touching on Trump’s global retreat, the slowing economy and House Dem optimism about the mid-terms. We also spend time diving into a law suit Rep. Goldman and other House Dems have brought against DHS for denying them access to ICE detention facilities across the country. Get to this one when you have time. It is a great window into our current moment from a thoughtful Member on the front lines of so many battles right now. Watching Rep. Goldman in TV these last few years I’ve become a fan, and I think you will too. Now, Let’s Go Win The Fall Everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Support Our November, 2025 Candidates
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Our updated fundraising goals are now for the end of the year, December 31st, except for the 2025 races, which are now for Election Day, 2025. For more on Hopium’s approach to elections check out 1) the many important wins we had together last cycle 2) my big recommendations to the family coming out of the 2024 elections about what we need to do now 3) my latest thinking on where we are and the path forward for the Hopium community. Take Action, Express Your Love Of Country Through Good Works - We are prioritizing two actions today. You can get our full list of recommended actions here. Let’s get to it: 1 - Call Your Senators and Member Of The House And Demand They Act Upon Our Four-Part Agenda - We need to be loud people, very, very loud and make the case for our our emerging four part agenda. Demand that your reps work to
2 - Bring “Resolutions Of Condemnation” To Your Community - Inspired by the tactics of our Founders learn about how Hopium members are advancing “Resolutions of Condemnation” in their communities across the country and consider bringing this initiative to your state, country or city/town. Be sure to check out our new discussion with Deborah Potter and Rachel Poliner who have passed resolutions in New Mexico and Boston, and offer advice on how to get a resolution passed in your own community. Remarkably, members of this community are now advancing 75 (!!!!) resolutions projects in 23 states +DC. Can we get to all 50 states by the fall election? Finally, please self-report your activities to our daily paid subscriber chat. These reports help inspire all of us to do more and fight harder! Been impressive to see how many of you remain involved in local, in person protests of all kinds in your communities. Keep it up!!! As we get ready for what is going to be a very intense fall of politics let’s take inspiration from those famous words from Robert Frost that “the best way out is always through.” Means we just have to put our heads down and do the work everyone! - Simon Thank you for your financial support of our wonderful Hopium community. This support allows us to do our work, and keep most of our content free for others to learn from and enjoy. |
Sunday, September 7, 2025
Surrender Not War, Trump Rebukes Kennedy On Vaccines, Rep. Dan Goldman Shares His Thoughts On Where We Are Now (Resend)
Saturday, July 19, 2025
MeidasTouch Letter to Reporters After COLBERT COUP
MeidasTouch Letter to Reporters After COLBERT COUPBy Ben Meiselas
To all reporters with dignity and fearlessness: The latest actions by CBS should show you once and for all that corporate news in America is no different than regime media in Russia or North Korea. In fact, the first thing Putin did when he consolidated power was to go after the comedians who made jokes about him. When I recently interviewed legendary musician Ben Folds, he made a great point: that authoritarians like Trump claim they don’t care about the arts, yet the first thing they always do is dismantle it. This is a major moment for you. It won’t be easy for you to leave corporate news. But you must leave. You can no longer delude yourself with thoughts that you can avoid being complicit in aiding and abetting authoritarianism and that you can do it your way. You can’t. You are being used to prop up a dictatorship in America that is using concentration camps, disappearing people, and starving millions of people abroad to death by incinerating emergency food aid. The moment you get slightly out of line, you will be fired and your dignity will be stripped. You will wake up and not know what hit you. So you must leave now. You must take control of the situation. I know it may seem scary. It may seem financially perilous. I get it. Trust me. Our networks started from nothing. But when you speak the truth and speak with passion and focus on bringing people together, anything is possible. I want all you reporters to know that the MeidasTouch Network is growing. Even if we ultimately can’t hire you and bring you on board, we love to promote the work of other people’s Substacks. I’ve dedicated hundreds of hours to promote the Substacks and work of like-minded reporters. Independent media is the way of the future. You must make the move now and trust yourself and your moral compass. If they can get rid of Stephen Colbert, literally one of the most successful hosts in TV history, anyone and everyone is expendable in service of the fascist regime. Build with us. Work with us. Let’s change the media landscape together as MeidasTouch is doing now. Let’s look back at these difficult days when people said what we are doing is impossible, but know that we persevered because we never gave up and never gave in. I know you have a lot to think about now after this letter. I promise you can do it. And you should know we have the Meidas Mighty here fighting. That’s our community at the MeidasTouch Network. Heck, they built this network. They power this network day in and day out by subscribing. They are my boss, my friends, my family, my motivation, my heroes. I work for them. That’s what it means to be the biggest independent media network in America and the world with more views than any news network. You are run by your community, not right-wing oligarchs. And those who are not subscribed to this Substack yet, please join today. We need you in the fight. We’ve got some great momentum. I want us to be able to attract all the top talent out there and expand the way we have been. We need your help for that by subscribing, of course, and we will keep delivering results. We will keep meeting the moment day in and day out—fighting for our freedoms back. Fighting for our country and for a better world. |
Monday, July 14, 2025
Falling In Line
Dispatches of alarm and hope, on politics and society, democracy and justice. Because silence is not an option. We may read and write alone, but we drive change together. Falling In LineSoberly imagining the future of a Trump win in December 2023
Maybe you’re thinking that the current battle within MAGA over the release of the Epstein files will bring Trump down. Maybe you were uplifted, as I was, by Rosie O’Donnell’s fierce snapback at Trump’s threat to strip her of her citizenship. Perhaps you were heartened by the temporary restraining order of a California district judge who ruled that the government must stop “indiscriminately rounding up individuals without reasonable suspicion” and “solely” on such factors as race, ethnicity, speaking Spanish or standing “at a particular location.” But the hostile forces supporting this White House occupant are at war with the country we love, and we shouldn’t doubt that they will continue at all costs their campaign to trample our Constitution and our better angels as they pursue the dismantling of our democratic enterprise. I don’t write this to discourage you from the necessity of resistance—to speaking out and loudly protesting in every way we can—but rather to underscore what we’re up against. This was confirmed by re-reading several of my previously published essays. This included “Aiming for Dictatorship” from July 20, 2023 that introduced the threat of Project 2025 and “Soberly Imagining the Future” from Dec. 1, 2023 that warned how close we were to Trump winning the nomination and silencing dissent among Republicans. The latter, shared here, highlighted the thinking of historian Robert Kagan, who warned that “a Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable,” hastened by a failure of imagination to recognize and oppose what that would entail. As Kagan put it, “We continue to drift toward dictatorship, still hoping for some intervention that will allow us to escape the consequences of our collective cowardice, our complacent, willful ignorance and, above all, our lack of any deep commitment to liberal democracy.” At a later point, I intend to share some of what I’m learning from Kagan’s 2024 book, Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart. For now, allow me to share one of his insights about the limited “liberalism” that emerged from the American Revolution: “It’s sole function was to protect certain fundamental rights of all individuals against the state and the wider community—rights that John Locke identified as life, liberty, and property, with ‘liberty’ encompassing the right to believe in the gods one chooses, or no god at all, without fear of oppression by the state or one’s neighbors, and to be secure in one’s person from unlawful abuse and seizure.” Kagan emphasized that this limited view of government did not overtly include improving “human existence,” but as we know now, we are facing a Trump regime that does not even support that most basic commitment to ensuring that people in America are safe from unlawful abuse. “Soberly Imagining the Future”I had a plan to write about Elon Musk telling a room of advertisers to “Go F*** Yourself”—not once in passing, but a handful of times—to express his anger that major companies just might have the right to exit his platform which empowers abuse and bigotry and where he personally has traded in antisemitic slurs (among other forms of hateful attacks). I also had a plan to discuss yesterday’s reinstatement of the gag order by a New York appeals court in an attempt to stem the hateful and dangerous abuse Donald Trump is spewing online and off—leading Judge Arthur Engoron to insist that he will “rigorously and vigorously” enforce this order. I wanted to write about the narcissism and arrogance of Musk and Trump, who are convinced that norms don’t apply to them, that their money and power freed them to say and do whatever they want—and millions of voters and fans are thrilled by their behavior, despite (and often because of) the damage it causes. But then I saw yesterday’s deeply sobering Washington Post column by Robert Kagan that opens by telling readers to “stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality.” The headline pretty well sums it all up: “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” That gave me pause—and I’m sure it gives nearly everyone who reads America, America pause, too. As much effort as I spend to articulate the dangers both in our midst and potentially ahead of us, Kagan’s second sentence makes clear what he thinks is at stake: “There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day.” Twice I’ve written essays titled “Aiming for Dictatorship,” laying out the efforts of the vast network of right-wing believers to end liberal government and America as we know it with their Project 2025. This Trump-inspired enterprise would strip away an independent judiciary and a non-partisan civil service, put millions of migrants in detention camps and deport them without due process, concentrate all power in the hands of the president (their so-called “unitary executive”), and surround Trump with sycophants in order to successfully pursue retribution against his enemies, real and perceived. In my own reflection on this, I imagined we have a year to get this right—to push back against the tyrannizing minority and the network of extremists who are more than happy to end the American democratic experiment. That’s true—the election day is November 5, 2024, and I remain clear that most Americans seek a better, more hopeful outcome for our country. But Kagan’s stern warning slapped me in the face: “In 13 weeks, Donald Trump will have locked up the Republican nomination.” That is, 22 states will have voted in their Republican primaries (and caucuses), including eight in January, February and the first days of March, and 14 more on March 5 (which I’m not about to call a “super” Tuesday). Any other imagined outcome, Kagan asserts—you know, maybe Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis or the cascade of indictments will change the trajectory and doom Trump—portrays hopeful speculators “living in a world of self-delusion, rich with imagined possibilities.” Thirteen weeks. In 13 weeks, there will not be a single criminal conviction that could push the defendant facing 91 felony charges off his accelerating path toward the nomination. OK, maybe he’ll have been jailed for violating a gag order, but let’s not imagine that will discourage his primary voters—more likely, they will become even more fervently committed. And once Trump locks up the nomination? “The magical-thinking phase” will end, Kagan writes, ushering in the new chapter when the surviving voices of GOP dissent (however faint) will go dead-silent. Once those primary voters weigh in, “there will be a swift and dramatic shift in the political power dynamic, in his favor.” Kagan adds:
And for all of us who remain hopeful that upcoming criminal trials may change this dangerous trajectory, Kagan rightly notes that Trump is planning to exploit them “to boost his candidacy and discredit the American justice system as corrupt—and the media outlets, serving their own interests, will help him do it.” Kagan also references a “paralyzing psychology of appeasement” at work, in which “the price of stopping Trump has risen higher and higher” at every opportunity since 2016. Not only have one-time opponents like Bob Corker and Paul Ryan ended their political careers, others let their fear—for their jobs and the physical safety of their families and themselves—cause them to refuse voting for Trump’s impeachment or conviction. As Kagan puts it, “given the magnitude of the crisis,” shouldn’t people be “taking every conceivable measure” to stop it? Yet, speaking metaphorically, “I know that most people don’t think an asteroid is heading toward us and that’s part of the problem.” Let’s be sure: Descending into dictatorship is not inevitable. Kagan acknowledges that he could be wrong, and that “unforeseen events” can change this dark direction. He knows some readers will find his view too pessimistic, even if he doesn’t agree. “Maybe, despite everything, Trump won’t win,” Kagan says. “Maybe the coin flip will come up heads and we’ll all be safe. And maybe even if he does win, he won’t do any of the things he says he’s going to do. You may be comforted by this if you choose.” But Kagan warns that few Republicans—and not enough liberals for that matter—have fully grasped the potential future cost of opposing Trump. America has never been closer to critics facing “persecution, the loss of property and possibly the loss of freedom…the ruin of oneself and one’s family.” The ramifications of this lack of imagination: “we continue to drift toward dictatorship, still hoping for some intervention that will allow us to escape the consequences of our collective cowardice, our complacent, willful ignorance and, above all, our lack of any deep commitment to liberal democracy.” It’s a powerful warning, and a reminder to each of us that this need not be our collective fate. But it will take the hard work of every one of us to ensure that this sobering vision of the future does not become our reality. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber for $50 a year or just $5 a month, if you’re not already. This helps sustain and expand the work of America, America, keeps nearly all the content free for everyone and gives you full access to the comment sections. |
Top News | 'He’s Not Going to Run Unopposed': Sanders Rejects Schumer for Majority Leader
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