Tag Archives: Trump

Project 2025: What’s All the Fuss About?

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What is Project 2025? Project 2025 is a blueprint for actions the Trump administration should take once it regains power. It was sponsored and paid for by the Heritage Foundation, and an extreme right-wing think-tank.

Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but he can’t. The name “Trump” is mentioned approximately 201 times in the text, not counting footnotes or author bios. The people who wrote Project 2025 are all Trump adherents and colleagues. More than 140 people who formerly worked for him are involved, including former chief of staff Mark Meadows and advisor Stephen Miller. J.D. Vance wrote the forward. Six of his former Cabinet secretaries were also involved. (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-claims-not-to-know-who-is-behind-project-2025-a-cnn-review-found-at-least-140-people-who-worked-for-him-are-involved/ar-BB1pN666?ocid=feedsansarticle) If you go to the full text of Project 2025 that I posted at https://theobsidianmirror.net/project-2025-in-its-entirety/ , you will see a lot of names from the Trump Administration. So I think we can lay to rest the notion that Trump doesn’t know the people behind Project 2025 or anything about it, as he claims.

The following is just a smattering of the extreme and dangerous measures Project 2025 advocates. I had to cherry-pick or this post would be as long as the Project document. The interpretation of what is being proposed is mine. If you disagree with my take, please go read Project 2025 for yourself at https://theobsidianmirror.net/project-2025-in-its-entirety/

What actions does Project 2025 advocate? Project 2025 is nearly 900 pages long, and the language is not always as direct as its meaning. For example, it says, “”For the sake of child well-being, programs should affirm that children require and deserve both the love and nurturing of a mother and the play and protection of a father.” This does not baldly state that Republicans want one man with one woman to be the only legitimate form of marriage–but it clearly means that the Republicans want one man/one woman to be the only form of acceptable marriage.

If you want to take solid action against Project 2025, I recommend filing a formal complaint against the foundation with the IRS for violating the injunction against political activity or expression for 501c3 non-profits. If you read Project 2025 or have a good understanding of it, it is clearly in violation of the foundation’s non-profit status. I have created a page on this blog called “Filing a Complaint Against the Heritage Foundation (https://theobsidianmirror.net/file-a-complaint-against-the-heritage-foundation/), and it contains a copy of the complaint form and accompanying letter that I filed with the IRS–so I’ve done the work for you. Start by downloading Form 13909 from irs.gov.

Family and Marriage: Project 2025 is clear that the only legitimate marriage is between one man and one women. A quote from the Project: “Protect faith-based grant recipients from religious liberty violations and maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family.” When they say “Biblical,” they are specifically leaving out all but the Christian and (maybe) Jewish religions. Of course, anyone familiar with the Bible knows that there are many different versions of marriage on offer in the Bible, but the authors of Project 2025 are oblivious to this.

From Project 2025: “Unfortunately, family policies and programs under President Biden’s HHS are fraught with agenda items focusing on “LGBTQ+ equity,” subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage. These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families.” Obviously, by “nuclear families,” they do not mean “same-sex families,” and they are making that clear.

“Additionally, Congress should pass the Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act62 to ensure that providers and organizations cannot be subjected to discrimination for providing adoption and foster care services based on their beliefs about marriage.” In other words, religious-based adoption agencies will be free to discriminate against LGBTQ+ couples and anyone who doesn’t fit the Republican definition of marriage.

“The HMRE program should receive a fair and realistic assessment. Additionally, the positive role of faith-based programs should be protected— 481 —Department of Health and Human Services and prioritized so that these programs do not receive undue scrutiny or pressure to conform to nonreligious definitions of marriage and family as put forward by the recently enacted Respect for Marriage Act.” In other words, discrimination against anyone who does not conform to the ReThuglikkkon idea of marriage is fine.

“Protect faith-based grant recipients from religious liberty violations and maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family. Social science reports that assess the objective outcomes for children raised in homes aside from a heterosexual, intact marriage are clear: All other family forms involve higher levels of instability (the average length of same-sex marriages is half that of heterosexual marriages); financial stress or poverty; and poor behavioral, psychological, or educational outcomes.” This references a study performed by The New Family Structures Study (abbreviated NFSS), a sociological study of LGBT parenting conducted by sociologist Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas at Austin. The study surveyed over 15,000 Americans of ages 18 to 39. The first research article based on data from the study was published in July 2012 in Social Science Research, and concluded that people who had had a parent who had been in a same-gender relationship were at a greater risk of several adverse outcomes, including “being on public assistance, being unemployed, and having poorer educational attainment.” From Wikipedia: “The study was met with considerable criticism from many academics and scholarly organizations. Of note, only two children in the study had actually lived with homosexually partnered parents for their entire childhoods, because many of the same-sex partnered parents were in previous heterosexual marriages. Thus, negative outcomes or events cannot be attributed to having same-sex parents, because many of these children also spent their childhoods with opposite-sex parents, and experienced family disruption and parental divorce. A 2015 reanalysis raised serious questions about the validity of the study, finding misclassification of families, inconsistency in answers suggesting mischief, and evidence that many respondents did not live with their non-heterosexual parents. When these cases were excluded, differences in outcome between children raised by parents in opposite-sex and same-sex relationships largely vanished.”

“For the sake of child well-being, programs should affirm that children require and deserve both the love and nurturing of a mother and the play and protection of a father.” This clearly states that the Republicans want one man/one woman to be the only form of acceptable marriage.

Health: “…the project recommends withdrawing the abortion pill mifepristone from the market and stopping the drug from being mailed, eliminating mandated insurance coverage for the week-after pill, prohibit funding for patients traveling across state lines for reproductive health care and prohibit funding for health care centers that provide abortions.” (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/project-2025-conservative-presidential-list/story?id=111952315)

Quote from Project 2025: “The Office of the Secretary should eliminate the HHS Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force and install a pro-life task force to ensure that all of the department’s divisions seek to use their authority to promote the life and health of women and their unborn children.” Additionally, HIPAA law will be revised to assure that all fetuses are regarded as fully human beings.

 The Office of Science and Medicine will withdraw all recommendations for gender-affirming care. “…the project proposes eliminating several terms from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists” including: “sexual orientation,” “gender,” “gender equality,” “gender awareness,” “gender-sensitive” “abortion,” “reproductive health,” “reproductive rights,” “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and more.” (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/project-2025-conservative-presidential-list/story?id=111952315)

Immigration: The border will be sealed. ICE will be given full reign to arrest immigrants anywhere in the United States, as there will be no sanctuary zones. Immigrants will be evaluated for legal entry based on their skills and not on their need–“…gang violence and domestic violence are not grounds for asylum.”

The border wall will be completed. We all know how effective that will be. For one thing, most immigrants aren’t coming into this country across the border. They come in airplanes. (https://www.npr.org/2019/01/10/683662691/where-does-illegal-immigration-mostly-occur-heres-what-the-data-tell-us)

Foreign policy: End our economic relationship with China. (I hope I need not point out how economically disruptive this would be.)

All ambassadors who have liberal views or have expressed negative opinions about Trump will be fired and replaced with Trump loyalists.

Bear in mind that much of Project 2025 is based on misinformation. In the area of foreign policy, Project 2025 states, “…the Obama Administration threw the brutal regime an economic lifeline by giving hundreds of billions of dollars to the Iranian government and providing other sanctions relief.” The facts of the matter are that Obama made $1.7 billion dollar payment in non-US currency as the resolution of an arbitration case that had gone on for years. (https://apnews.com/united-states-government-fd4113419276444eba1d2a46d5c29752) Obama used the payment as leverage to free US hostages.

From Project 2025: “Shift strategic focus from assistance to growth. Reorient the focus of U.S. overseas development assistance away from stand-alone humanitarian development aid and toward fostering free market systems in African countries by incentivizing and facilitating U.S. private sector engagement in these countries.” In other words, exploit African resources to the fullest extent to the benefit of U.S. corporations and abandon humanitarian and financial aid. A return to 19th-Century-style economic colonialism.

Withdraw support from international organizations unless they directly serve U.S. interests. “.For example, the Trump Administration withdrew from, or terminated funding for, the United Nations Human Rights Council, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, and the WHO. The results were redeployment of taxpayer dollars to better uses—and other organizations “getting the message” that the United States will not allow itself and its money to be used to undermine its own interests.” A selfish and self-serving policy that typifies Project 2025 throughout.

Governance: We all are aware that Republicans want “smaller government,” even if that means destroying the value that we have built over the years. Project 2025 refers to federal employees as “…largely underworked, overcompensated, and unaccountable federal civilian workforce.” It states that federal employees are “ideologically aligned, not with the American
people—but with one another, posing a profound problem for Republican government, a government “of, by, and for” the people.” This is just untrue. Statistics show that the American people in general are “unaligned” with Republican values. For example, 62% of Americans believe abortion should be legal in most cases (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/07/15/key-facts-about-the-abortion-debate-in-america/) A majority (57%) of adults say the U.S. hasn’t gone far enough when it comes to giving women equal rights with men. (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/13/key-takeaways-on-americans-views-on-gender-equality-a-century-after-u-s-women-gained-the-right-to-vote/) This is in direct opposition to Republicans, who have taken the right to abortion away from women, and are clearly working on other means of controlling and suppressing women.

Social Services: “…according to the American Main Street Initiative’s analysis of official federal tallies—Medicare and Medicaid combined cost $17.8 trillion, while our combined federal deficits over that same span were $17.9 trillion. In essence, our deficit problem is a Medicare and Medicaid problem.” This is just a baldfaced lie. Medicare is not funded through taxes, but by individual contributions and investment. Medicare has NOTHING to do with the deficit, and Republicans are well aware of this. Medicaid is funded through a joint partnership of the states and the Federal government. Medicaid and CHIP combined are only 13% of the nation’s spending on healthcare, so it is not an obvious villain in this piece. The largest spending is 70% on something labeled “Other Federal Outlays.” (https://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/faqs-on-health-spending-the-federal-budget-and-budget-enforcement-tools/) Maybe someone should be looking into “Other Federal Outlays.”

And yet, the stated intention is to end Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid. There are no plans to replace these services.

Taxes: Republicans have been unable to wean themselves from the idea that giving more money to already obscenely wealthy people will result in general prosperity. Trump gave billionaires a tax break and sent the National Debt into the stratosphere. FromProPublica: “The national debt has risen by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump’s time in office. That’s nearly twice as much as what Americans owe on student loans, car loans, credit cards and every other type of debt other than mortgages, combined, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It amounts to about $23,500 in new federal debt for every person in the country.”(https://www.propublica.org/article/national-debt-trump)

And they want to do it again under a new Trump administration. This approach is completely false, has never worked, never will work, and will create more economic chaos. Ordinary citizens will wind up paying more than billionaires (which they already do in many cases). (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/project-2025-wants-radically-change-230008655.html)

Education: “Bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms.” No substantiation for this is provided, and I believe it just means they don’t like historical facts–like the way slaves were treated in the United States.

“Through the CCP’s Confucius Institutes, Beijing has been just as successful at compromising and coopting our higher education system as they have at compromising and coopting corporate America.” Again, no substantiation is offered, and my basic response is, “Huh?”

The Department of Education will be “shuttered,” returning 100% of responsibility for education to the states. I think we know what the result of that will be: red-state children will be thoroughly indoctrinated in extreme right-wing ideologies, while children in blue states will get an actual education.

Unions: Re unions of public employees: “Congress should also consider whether public-sector unions are appropriate in the first place. The bipartisan consensus up until the middle of the 20th century held that these unions were not compatible with constitutional government.” Spoiler alert: they are not in favor of public employees having unions.

All unions in the Department of Homeland Security would be removed “for national security purposes.” It never states how unions would be a national security threat.

“The next Administration should make new options available to workers and push Congress to pass labor reforms that create non-union ’employee involvement organizations’ as well as a mechanism for worker representation on corporate boards.” Translation: we will replace unions with pro forma organizations within corporations composed of both workers and management. I think we all know how that one goes.

This is just a sampling of the ill-conceived, thoughtless, radical changes that Trump will be making if he is re-elected. If he is not re-elected, don’t think Project 2025 goes away. They’ll just pursue it a lot more quietly. Vote blue.

How To Deal with the Elephant in the Room

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I haven’t been blogging much lately. I pride myself on variety, but the only thing I’ve really been paying attention to recently is politics. I don’t want this blog to become a political blog.

However, I’m going to post one more politically oriented piece, because I want all liberals and progressives in this country to understand the implications. It’s not about my ideas. I want to summarize the book, “Don’t Think of an Elephant,” by Dr. George Lakoff, a neural scientist. Despite his heavyweight scientific credentials, the book is very accessible and easy to read.

Dr. Lakoff wrote the first version of the book in 2008 to explain to liberals and progressives (I’m just going to say liberals from now on) how and why the Republicans have been able to direct the national dialogue and get Tea Party candidates into legislative seats locally, statewide, and nationally. He shows how our brain’s wiring leads to conservatism or liberalism. Reading his book opened my eyes wide, and I’m hoping all liberal politicians will read it, too.

Lakoff talks in terms of “frames.” Frames are concepts we have in our brains that are evoked by words. So when I say “taxes,” it evokes “pay for our infrastructure and services” in my liberal brain. A conservative’s brain has a frame that taxes are bad, a burden. So when Republicans in the George W. era came up with the term, “tax relief,” conservatives saw it as saving them from the bad thing, making the Republicans heroic. The problem is, the rest of the culture­—especially the media—picked up that verbiage. Every time “tax relief” is repeated, it becomes a more firmly entrenched frame.

Republicans did the same thing with the Affordable Care Act by calling it Obamacare, which everyone (me included) immediately started using. It evokes a negative frame with conservatives, so much so that there are many Republicans who have only just now discovered they are losing their health insurance. They thought they were safe because they weren’t on Obamacare—they were on the ACA.

The Republicans have been doing this effectively and successfully for the past 40 years. We liberals are wa-a-a-a-ay behind. Let’s see how they do it.

Morality and Politics

Lakoff states that all politics is moral. By this he means that people vote according to their morality, not necessarily according to self-interest. (I know, how could they possibly vote for an amoral beast like Trump? Bear with me.)

Morality for conservatives looks something like this:

  • Society needs a strong leader. Like a strict father, he knows best and will tell us what the right thing to do is. This is why many conservatives are deeply religious. Religion provides a strict, clear guide to behavior and thought. Trump is seen as a strong leader in this mold.
  • Children are born bad and they have to be “made” good with the direction of a strict father who teaches them right from wrong. By extension, this applies to citizens and their leadership.
  • People need to do what they are told. If they fail to do so, they must be punished. Without punishment, there can be no morality.
  • Wealthy people are admired because obviously, they are doing the right thing. Religious people see riches as God’s blessing on the deserving (helped along by the evangelicals who have for some time now encouraged their followers to “seed” the blessings of wealth by giving to their churches, in the expectation that God will return it to them many-fold). The wealthy create jobs, and their money trickles down to the lower orders (despite the fact this has been debunked over and over it is firmly entrenched in the conservative brain).
  • Poor people are obviously undeserving because they are poor. They choose to be poor. We should not give them “free stuff” like food stamps, healthcare, education, early childhood enrichment, etc., because that will just make them more lazy and undeserving. This is why Republicans want to cut taxes—not to provide “tax relief” to the working class, but to cut social services entirely if possible.
  • Moral people take responsibility for themselves and do not need “free stuff.” Morality is linked to prosperity. Prosperity is linked to self-interest, therefore morality is linked to self-interest. (Hence voting your morality is seen as voting for your self-interest, whether or not that is the case in fact.)
  • Government is bad because it takes our hard-earned money and spends it foolishly by providing services (“free stuff”) to the undeserving. We need taxes so that we have a strong military, however.
  • Liberals are bad people. They just want free stuff. They have bad morals, as evidenced by their support for abortion and LGBTQ rights. Liberals want to raise taxes so they can give away your money to the undeserving. They are stupid because they don’t see things the way conservatives do. And if you are a Breitbart News follower, liberals are behind everything evil.
  • Women are not equal to men. They do not have or deserve authority because they are weak and emotional. They need a strong man to show them the right way.

There’s more, but this ought to be sufficient to set the stage and explain why deeply religious people voted for Trump. Rationally, you might think that a billionaire with two divorces and five children by three different wives, multiple affairs, a suspected child rapist, a confessed sexual assaulter, someone who cheats his contractors and doesn’t pay taxes and possibly is a Russian collaborator would not be the first choice for religious Christians. But they saw him as a strong leader who will build a wall, keep out the Muslims, and protect us. Despite his four bankruptcies, they also view him as an incredibly successful businessman. And he promised to cut taxes and bring back jobs to America. All of this is seen as virtuous.

Rather than rationally comparing Trump’s record with their espoused beliefs, they made Trump’s record conform to their beliefs and ignored the rest—assisted by the fake news that conservatives have been marinating in for the past three or four decades.

The world is a zero-sum game to conservatives; if you want to win, someone else has to lose. So in order for them to win, the Others—people of color, people of non-Christian beliefs, differently gendered people, foreigners—have to lose.

Obviously, not all conservatives have the entire mindset described above, but they all believe consciously or unconsciously in some part of it. If you are a liberal, this might be a bit hard to swallow. It seems too simplistic, but it’s true for many people at least some of the time. Many conservatives really do see you as a “libtard”—a stupid person with no morals who is probably unemployed and taking “free stuff” that conservatives imagine they are paying for with their taxes—and it pisses them off. I have seen this personally as I have wandered around the social media scene.

I’m not going to spend time on liberal morality, as presumably you, a liberal, already understand it. If there’s a conservative out there who by some weird chance has read this far and really wants to understand liberal morality, I would be happy to explain if you ask nicely.

Framing

A bad example of President Nixon’s framing gives us an idea of how framing does and does not work. During the Watergate scandal, Nixon famously said, “I am not a crook.” So everyone thought of him as a crook, as this was repeated over and over and over.

Repetition strengthens frames. So when using conservatives’ language and frames, we are handing them the argument. It’s critical to come up with frames that fit your argument and that cannot be used against you. It is critical not to repeat conservative framing, such as “alternative facts.” There is no such thing; what we’re talking about here is lies.

To come up with effective framing requires understanding the conservative point of view. Let’s take that hottest of hot potatoes, abortion. Conservatives have been conditioned by decades of propaganda to view abortion as murder. Liberals have rejected this without replacing it with anything more compelling than a “Republican War on Women.” This plays well with liberals, but conservatives believe that women need to be controlled, so it doesn’t resonate with them.

Let’s try framing it in terms of one of the conservatives’ most powerful words: liberty. When you tell women they cannot have abortions, you are removing their liberty and personal responsibility, but worse—it’s a short step from there to telling women how many children they may or may not have, as they did in China. Or telling them they can’t have children. You cannot be free when government has placed a restriction on your right to have or not have children.

A personal note here. The conservatives have used “pro-life” with great effect in contrast to the liberal “pro-choice.” Pro-choice says you’re just selfish; you are placing your own needs over the precious life of a child, as opposed to the obvious virtue of pro-life. I am using “pro-child”; every child born has the right to be cared for, fed, clothed, given an education and provided with the tools required for a happy and productive life within his or her abilities. No mention of abortion is made, but hidden within the frame of pro-child is an unstated support for abortion if the fetus is unwanted (as a way to begin life, being unwanted has a very poor outlook), too sick to survive, or a threat to the mother’s life.

Conservative politicians are also attacking pensions, Medicare and Social Security. The word “entitlement” is the actual language of the law for Medicare and Social Security. The conservatives easily began framing these services as “free stuff,” the sort of thing “entitled people” demand, when in fact they are either deferred earned salaries in the case of Social Security and pensions, or paid for in the form of premiums, as in Medicare. We must start pushing back on the term “entitlements” and even “benefits,” and begin pushing the concept of “deferred salaries” and “single-payer healthcare.”

How to Engage with Conservatives

There are essentially two types of conservatives from a communications standpoint. One group is composed of idealogues who are firmly entrenched in their beliefs and resist other ideas completely. You can’t engage with this group.

A second, and perhaps larger group of conservatives are those who hold both conservative and liberal ideas:

chart

 

 

 

 

This “bi-conceptual” group can be appealed to by avoiding conservative framing and language and by following the following tactics laid out by Dr. Lakoff:

  • Remember that your liberal values are the true values of America. Be proud of them.
  • Remember that conservatives approve of a strong father-type of government. They don’t view it as dangerous, but as protective.
  • Show respect. If you do not treat conservatives with respect and indicate that you have at least heard them out, they will slam the door. Don’t get into a shouting match.
  • Distinguish between normal conservatives and nasty idealogues (like Steve Bannon). The everyday conservative usually has some progressive ideas that can be tapped into. Idealogues don’t, so don’t try. Most conservatives are more like you than not.
  • Be calm. Getting angry or defensive signals weakness and lack of conviction. (Remember that when you encounter those very sore winners on Facebook!)
  • Be passionate without losing control by becoming defensive.
  • Don’t give them any opportunity to slam you into their stereotype of a liberal: weak, bleeding heart, unpatriotic, uninformed, elitist, wants free stuff.
  • Rather than arguing or negating , ask questions. When a person is unclear on the stand s/he is taking, trying to justify an unjustifiable stand can become clear without you saying anything. Frames trump facts, so if the conservative in question accepts your frame, the rest of the conversation is just common sense within that frame.
  • Never repeat their frames. If someone says “Liberals are just lazy and want free stuff,” do not repeat their verbiage. Say something like, “I have a job. I’ve worked all my life and paid taxes.”
  • Be informed. If you get into a conversation on a topic in which you are poorly informed, there’s no winning it. Choose your battles and engage only in the ones you can win.
  • Think and talk at the level of values. Point out how your values support their values. We all want freedom, clean air and water, forests, lakes and rivers. Many conservatives, for instance, are hunters and fishermen. They don’t want our national parks turned into oil wells and mines any more than you do.

This blog piece only skims the surface of “Don’t Think of an Elephant.” I hope I have presented a few of Lakoff’s ideas accurately, but please read the book to gain a deeper understanding of how to win this cultural war that we didn’t ask for, but we’re fighting  anyway.

If you thought this piece had information of value to others, please feel free to share it in any way you please. Good luck in the days and maybe weeks or years to come; I believe that traditional liberal American values will win in the end. I have to.

P.S. Obscene, angry comments will be deleted without reply. Respectful comments or questions will be answered.

* * * *

For the next three weeks, I will be traveling in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, researching my next book, the third in the trilogy starting with “The Obsidian Mirror.” The second book, “Fire in the Ocean,” which takes place primarily on Moloka ‘i, HI, is due out later this year from Diversion Books. I won’t be sipping margaritas on the beach at Cancun, but I will be blogging about the trip daily (or almost daily), starting on Saturday. I hope you enjoy!

 

 

 

 

Our Democracy Has Failed. Now Is the Time To Focus.

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donald-trump

So the Electoral College has failed the Founding Fathers and ushered in the presidency of a manifestly unqualified and dangerous individual.

It’s time to focus.

Forget about Ivanka and Melania. Forget about his foolish, thin-skinned Tweets. Forget about his refusal to adhere to the norms of the Presidency.

Focus.

I know it’s fun to post memes about how awful and clownish and embarrassing he is. It’s also fun to bitch and moan online about it.

Stop. Focus.

There’s only one thing that matters now, and that is making sure Trump doesn’t spend all four years in office wrecking the country.

THE RUSSIANS HACKED OUR ELECTION.[i] Trump and his buddy, Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon, have collaborated with the Russian government to CHANGE THE RESULTS OF AN AMERICAN ELECTION.

Why? Money. Exxon and Trump had enormous, multi-billion-dollar oil deals with Russia that were derailed when President Obama placed sanctions on Russia for taking over the Crimea. Now that Trump and Exxon will be running the country, those sanctions will be lifted, and Trump and Tillerman and Putin will swim happily away together on a tide of billions of dollars.[ii] (Assuming Tillerman is confirmed by the Senate. If not, that shouldn’t change the basic strategy of lifting the sanctions and letting les bons temps roulées.)

I am aware that treason has not been proven. Yet. However, given the extremely shady “character” of the (not my) president-to-be, I feel fairly confident in saying it was collusion. If I am proven wrong, I’ll be the first to apologize. I’m not holding my breath. In the meantime, I say:

THIS IS TREASON.

It is also, more mildly, a completely illegal conflict of interest under the emoluments clause of the United States Constitution. Trump has a shitload of those, but this is the one that counts.

I REPEAT, THIS IS TREASON.

Please. Focus on treason and conflicts of interest and scream, yell and shout about it. Demonstrate in the streets about it. Write your representatives and senators about it.

Nothing else is as important, including soothing your unhappiness by posting memes about Trump’s unnatural relationship with his daughter. If we all focus our rage and energy and efforts on protesting TREASON on the part of an elected president­—someone who deliberately invited and collaborated with an unfriendly foreign power to make more money and gain power over us—maybe our legislators will get off their cowardly asses and do something to help us combat this beast.

Otherwise, resign yourself to not just another four years, but perhaps a lifetime of increasing repression, oppression, bigotry, voter suppression, rigged elections and the increased misery of the poor and disenfranchised.

In other words, you can look forward to violent revolution. You can only bully, threaten and marginalize people so long before they start fighting back.

__________________________________

[i] http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/19/politics/russian-election-hacking-podesta-brazile-mccain/

[ii] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2016/12/15/trump-russia-exxon-tillerson/#400782fe3a63

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Fear and Loathing in the United States

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trump-snakeI am not usually troubled by writer’s block. My philosophy has always been: just write. Throw out the dreck and keep and edit the good stuff. It’s always worked well for me.

But since November 8, I have largely been unable to write a blog post. I did manage to crank out a piece on safety pins, but that was it. I’ve been so stunned, angry and terrified at the prospect of a Trump presidency that I literally could not think what to write. I could always write about something else, except for the fact that I have been unable to think about anything else.

Also, I didn’t just want to list the things that are terrifying about Donald Trump. Every article I read lays his vileness out like a sacred litany, the list only getting longer day by day. I skip these articles now because I know the catechism by heart, and every new day brings a fresh load of excrement to digest.

Trump is like a juggernaut. Nothing seems to stop him. If any other candidate had said or done even one of the horrific things he’s come up with, they’d be political roadkill by now—but no, he’s going to be our president. Even the knowledge that the Russians hacked our electoral system to sway the election in Trump’s favor doesn’t seem to matter. I saw President Obama being interviewed by Trevor Noah last night, and he seemed completely blasé about the whole thing—he said we shouldn’t be surprised. That’s just what Russians do, dontchaknow.

One day I was living in a great country, where immigrants can find refuge, where people have compassion, where we care about discrimination and work against injustice. Not a perfect country, but a country always striving to be better. Overnight, I find myself in a horrific dystopian land where people in white hoods endorse presidential candidates, where Fascist policies are embraced with enthusiasm, where hatred, meanness, bigotry and scorn for science and education are the norm.

We are now waiting with a great deal of angst and dread for the Electoral College to vote in just five days. Other nations that do not enjoy the peculiar institution of an electoral college have a hard time following this. Americans are always bellowing about our proud democracy, but most of them appear not to know that the U.S. is NOT a democracy, it’s a republic. Sure, we let the little folks vote because it makes them feel like they have a say. But the REAL voters are the 538 citizens of the Electoral College. Normally, the EC votes track the actual vote, but not this time. The problem is the notion of winner-take-all. The electors are chosen by their party in each state. The New York Times says, “In every state except two, the party that wins the popular vote gets to send all of its electors to the state capital in December. In the nonconforming Maine and Nebraska, two electoral votes are apportioned to the winner of the popular vote, and the rest of the votes are given to the winner of the popular votes in each of the states’ congressional districts. (Maine has two congressional districts and Nebraska has three.)”

The number of electors depends on the state’s population. If a given state has a majority of votes for Candidate X, Candidate X takes ALL of that state’s EC votes. Electors can legally vote for whomever they please, but traditionally vote along party lines. The EC was designed by the Founding Fathers to prevent a manifestly unfit individual from becoming president, but has never actually overturned an election in the past, which would require an unprecedented large number of EC voters to vote against party lines.

It actually gets more complicated than that, but enough civics for one blog post.

For the first time in my life, some of the electors appear to be questioning the fitness of the president-elect to serve as president. Whether or not enough electors can be swayed by Trump’s scary clown act is the question of the day. I personally emailed all the electors to urge them not to vote for Trump. (I didn’t ask them to vote FOR any specific individual.) I got three responses, all canned, all from Texas. They all said they wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton—not that I asked them to. Basically, my stance at this point is “Anybody but Trump.” Even Mike Pence. Pence is an evil bastard, but he’s not actually insane. (I don’t think.) It’s easier to deal with straightforward evil than it is to work with random, ego-fueled, idea-of-the-minute craziness.

And if the Electoral College fails to do its duty, I will dedicate the rest of my life to getting the Electoral College abolished, as it clearly is not functioning as intended and in fact has become an impediment to democracy. That is, in my spare time when I am not protesting the rape of the environment, the crushing of women’s rights, and discrimination against all non-white, non-Christian, non-male citizens of this formerly great country.