DO NOT SUBMIT
Your guide to the way out of this catastrophic mess ...
This morning I want to start with some facts by vividly setting the scene …
Donald Trump is a dirty, old man, and a convicted felon, who attacked the United States of America, and most white people are completely good with it. Their notion of law and order, and Christian values are as completely phony and as pathetically weak as they are.
They talk out of both side of the same dirty mouthes they choose to eat with.
The double-standards in this country are — and have been — appalling and have been gruesomely normalized by a both-sides, worthless corporate media that profits by reacting to danger, instead of warning about it.
To Trump supporters I say this: If you have somehow twisted yourself into some self-righteous pretzel to justify your vote for a violent, racist, election-denying fascist YOU are the damn problem in this country, not us. This has happened many times before over the centuries with your type to no good end. If you would read even ONE history book your party wants burned you’d be forced to understand this, and maybe even deal with it. Oh, and here’s a dirty, little secret: The elites who run your dirty party fully know all this, and are using you for their terrible devices. As long as you support this, there is nothing you can say that I will ever listen to. You are a complete moral wreck. A mess. A five-alarm fire. You say you want cheaper gas and eggs, but fawn over the horrible man and circumstances that helped lead to their high cost in the first place with his subhuman response to a once-in-a-century pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of us needlessly. Even wearing masks to help prevent the spread of this invisible killer was too much to ask of you. Seriously, go straight to hell.
I typed all that high-octane facticity as a pretext for saying that I am NOT going to sit here and navel-gaze about everything Democrats allegedly did wrong the past four years, when no matter what they did right was roundly ignored in that media, while it was busy normalizing treason, the broken people who supported it, and tossed poll numbers at us like loaded grenades.
Joe Biden by and large did an excellent job of digging out of the mess TRUMP LEFT US. He stood up for our Democracy, rebuilt our infrastructure, added an incredible 16 million jobs, and as Forbes decided to FINALLY report today MOST of them did not go to new immigrants as Republicans alleged.
He was the right man for the right time, and has left the repulsive person replacing him a country that is in far better shape than he found it. Four years ago, I would have been typing this wondering when Americans would stop dying, and if ANYTHING would ever return to normal again ...
The biggest mistake we can make right now is to concede ANY ground to these rotten Trump bastards, who see good people on both sides of a KKK rally, our fallen as “suckers and losers” and shower love on people who stomped on and beat law enforcement officers, as they came within inches of overthrowing our government.
These are very, very dangerous times in America, led by dangerous people, and doubting that, or running away and hiding is exactly what they want.
So what to do right now?
Turn off and tune out most of that corporate media. Bare minimum, be very careful what you consume, and call out the nonsense when you see it. They have proven they are not interested, nor are they capable of, providing context and the necessary heft to report on what is happening in this country right now. They will continue to dance around it. Normalize it. Find independent journalism, journalists, and thinkers who you trust, and support them. They are out there, and doing tremendous work. Democracy needs more bandwidth. This is critical. Information is power, and we are being battered by the dangerous right-wing propaganda where truth has no place. Places like Fox “News” have literally broken this country in two. It is infiltrating hearts and minds. I could stand to see some sane, good-hearted billionaires funding independent journalism that plainly reports on, and illustrates the extreme threat to our country right now, and shines a light on the good things and the good people who are standing against it. That is, if these democracy-supporting billionaires even exist …
Stay involved in your grassroots organizations in your communities. These do not necessarily need to be political, and right now it is probably best that they aren’t. I am talking about the good-hearted folks who support women’s reproductive rights, the environment, and the new immigrants and refugees in this country, who are scared to death and living in fear right now. There are hundreds of groups doing tremendous work. Find them. Lend a hand. Throw them a few dollars.
Stop locking yourself into Democratic idioms and supposed truisms. They are a cancer. There needs to be a marketplace of ideas right now. We are in unprecedented territory. I am not advocating blowing anything up, but I am stressing that we must not lean on old, tired assumptions. I’m a white man in my 60s, and have absolutely no idea what is in the head of a 20-year-old college student, or a 33-year-old carpenter. Listen more, talk less. I know I need to do A LOT more of this.
On that note: One thing that is being missed — and badly in my opinion — is that more Americans identify as Independents than they do Republicans or Democrats. They don’t trust either party. This year, more Independents leaned Right than ever before. From Gallup in January: “As 2024 begins, the parties are closely matched based on political party identification and leanings. However, Democrats are clearly in a weaker position than they have been in any recent election year.” This was a very ominous warning that was completely missed. Mega-parties don’t have the answers, people do. I am an Independent, who right now exclusively votes for and works for Democrats. I am not a registered Democrat, however. I am an American voter. While I agree wholeheartedly with most of what I know to be the Democratic platform, there were some big misses the past four years that needed to be called out and weren’t. Chief among them was allowing Donald Trump any room to breathe after he violently attacked our country. Merrick Garland needed to act with alacrity following that homegrown terrorism, to make sure EVERYBODY understood you NEVER cross that line in America. Attacking America IS NOT OK. Instead Garland himself, proved to be a massive failure and a national-security nightmare. And if you are tired of me typing that, tough. Just LOOK who is moving back into our White House. Finally, do not listen to ANY Democrat who is talking about 2028 right now, because it is clear they completely missed what just happened.
Don’t breathe the noxious gas that there is a Republican mandate right now. Battleground States flipped. It happens. Here in Wisconsin, Kamala Harris actually got more votes than Joe Biden did on 2020. We worked our asses off up here and simply got beat in large part by the massive rightwing propaganda machine that I warned about above. Wisconsin is 90 percent white and under conventional wisdom should be a bright-red state. It’s not, because we have leaders and ideas that resonate with everybody. In fact … the best thing we can hope for is that Republicans read this election as a mandate, because as you know most of their odious plans will sting their voters at least as much as everybody else. Let them get out over their skies as far as possible, and then watch them crash.
Do not let your cynicism overtake your anger and resolve. This happened to me in 2016 and I literally published the book on it. This time is different. Trump proved without a doubt just how loathsome and dangerous he truly is. Millions of people’s lives are in danger, and we need to be vigilant. Find the happiness in your life wherever you can, and celebrate it. Some sort of balance is important for your mental and physical health. Again, this is something I need to work on.
Find good and necessary trouble wherever you can. I understand if you are disheartened, exhausted and fed up right now. You are all of these things only because you have the audacity to care. Many Americans don’t give a good goddam about this country. Fully a third of them couldn’t be bothered to vote. I do understand why some of these people think it is futile, because conditions never change for them no matter who is on the White House. For many of these folks voting itself is a grind. Did you see the endless voting lines in our cities on Election Day? This is completely abhorrent, racist as hell and intentional. We have failed these folks completely for decades, and cannot sit back and keep accepting that this is OK, or normal. It’s not. Voting should be the easiest thing in the world in a Democracy. Keep screaming about this. As to the rest of the people who don’t vote or engage out of laziness and willing ignorance, grab them by their collars, shake them, and call them out. Democracy is no free ride, and you have to pay the price for your freedom. You don’t get to just sit it out. These are the people I loathe most of all.
Do no submit. Let me type that again: DO NOT SUBMIT. Take heart you are on the right side of the fight and give it hell. We must win this battle, because losing is NOT an option this time around.
Onward!
(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.)
Welcome to the Second Gilded Age. Billionaires won. They own the dice, the pieces and the Monopoly board. We're all living on Baltic Ave now. Conventional persuasion failed. I'm going to look for ways to be subversive. In the meantime, I'm donating monthly to the ACLU, volunteering at the library (yay literacy!) and getting my news from trustworthy Substack writers, The Guardian, Daily Kos, Meidas Touch and a few others. No corporate media shall enter my brain pan.
I find the Guardian a reputable space for news these days. It might be worth it to your readers to check it out. You can subscribe for the free or paid version. After a year of using the free version, I am now entering my second year the paid version.