2. these folks- they made decisions that led to them contracting the virus. They purposely exposed themselves to the virus, & each other while taunting and criticizing appropriate safety measures. So its hard to feel bad for them. BUT they also insisted on putting innocent people
3. in danger & at some point, positive tests are going to start to pop up for those folks. People who DO follow safety recommendations. People who just wanted these people to wear a damn mask, limit their social contacts, behave as if there is a deadly pandemic out there instead
4. like petulant teenagers who simply can't sacrifice one damn year out of their lives, even if their actions will cause other people to die. BC that is what they have been doing for the past few months with their behavior. Hosting events that have led to people getting infected
5. and dying. And frankly, the only thing that would have ever stopped them was their own outbreak, which was bound to happen bc its a deadly pandemic and it only needed 1 breach to spread around a group of people crowded in shoulder to shoulder, not masking. If they had been
6. following CDC guidelines, if they had been masking and staying back from each other and behaving as the rest of us, with prudence and a healthy dose of caution, then even if there was a breach, it would not be ripping through them like a CA forest fire. But I am mostly fearful
7. for the innocent people that were forced into situations with these people. The Bidens, their team and their supporters at the debate who are now in danger bc the Trump family was indulged in their ridiculous refusal to follow public health rules of wearing masks inside.
8. And have the Trump kids- @IvankaTrump, @FLOTUS, @DonaldJTrumpJr@EricTrump@kimguilfoyle offered an apology that their political hack has now put the lives of other people in peril?? Has the media asked them for one? Why not? It is shameful. Same w the Pres debate commission-
9. they owe @JoeBiden and the other audience members an apology. They allowed the Trumps to skip testing bc he was allowed to arrive too late. They could have insisted on him arriving in time to accommodate testing. The Trump's have behaved shamefully, but much of what they do
10. they do bc of other people with power enabling them- apparently in some attempt to appear "bipartisan." Do your damn jobs- lives are on the line. Democracy is on the line. Your calculus should be on that.
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An Interview with Matthew Taylor, author of The Violent Take it by Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening our Democracy.
If you’ve been following the transition of the Republican Party from the party of Reagan into whatever the hell it is now you’ll know that the once “useful idiots” of the Republican Party, the Christian Right, now rule the party and they have big plans for Trump 2.0.
As Dr. Taylor points out in our interview about his book The Violent Take it by Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening our Democracy, for all the attention January 6th received, a key part of that story has been largely ignored.
I’m aware many of you want/need actionable advice on things you can do to help thwart what is coming so you don’t marinate in hopelessness. As Dr. DOOM, I’m not well-positioned for this role!
That’s why when I came across Emily Galvin-Almanza's threaded tweet offering tangible, actionable ideas for real resistance that can really matter I knew I needed to get it to you.
So, I reached out to Emily and offered her the opportunity to write up her ideas to share with The Cycle’s audience and I am delighted she agreed.
What follows is Emily’s article.
I, too, believe in the power of the corporeal.
But then again, I am also one of those elder millennials whose life has been a slipstream from watching 9/11 on my college dorm room TV set to having my high school friends sent to die in Iraq as the rest of us back home marched in the streets to no avail, to the financial crisis that would cost so many of us our future stability, to an impossible housing market, couples having crisis conversations about whether to bring kids into this world, and now enduring the start of Trump 2.0. It’s been a ride. And unlike my parents, it has not been a ride where the marches I have taken part in have singularly changed the course of history.
🧵Why Democrats Failed to Save Democracy
Identity Politics and Microtargeting Killed The Party's Brand
Once upon a time the Democratic Party, with its regional base in the Southern U.S. was the party of slavery, and then of segregation.
If you spend much time on social media you already know this because of the many times Trump voters have told you, “but Democrats are the party of segregation!”
Back in the 1950s and 1960s during the Jim Crow Era, the Democratic Party had morphed into an unholy alliance merging a party of liberal Whites and racist White Southerners into one big coalition that by staying together, dominated Congress for decades.
By the 1960s, the activism of MLK. Jr and thousands of other largely unnamed civil rights activists finally forced the Democratic Party to choose: preserve their large coalition or end segregation. In part due to the assassination of JFK, then-President Lyndon Johnson sided with civil rights for Blacks signing both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965 and in doing so, set off the realignment that would lead to total domination of the South by the Republican Party just a few decades later.
Via Nixon’s Southern Strategy, shrewd GOP strategists like Lee Atwater and Roger Stone recognized that white Southern conservatives were there for the taking, and took them they did relying on various racist dog whistles such as the Willie Horton ad and Reagan’s 1980s Black welfare queen propaganda.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party began to absorb liberal Republicans, predominantly in the North East and West Coast. Ideological liberals became Democrats and ideological conservatives became Republicans through a process known as party sorting and the modern 270 Electoral College map with its handful of swing states became the norm of American presidential elections.
Welcome to the Upside Down:
It's Gonna Be a Long, Strange Trip Into Autocracy
Folks, if you subscribe to the Cycle you know I like to give you reality straight, with no chaser. If you think your mental health isn’t up to that, please flee.
There will be little feel-good content coming from me. Instead, I plan on bringing you a weekly blow-by -blow documenting the decline of democracy loosely based on William Shirer’s work as a foreign correspondent reporting from Berlin in the early years of the Third Reich.
I’ll be calling this feature This is America, after Shirer’s (heavily censored) live radio show from the 1930s and I’ll be offering this service only to paid subscribers because I need to keep the lights on. In case you’re wondering how it’s going, I have no dental insurance so please consider converting your old newspaper subscription money into The Cycle and I will watch the decline of democracy so you don’t have to.
Its Starting to Look Like America Understands the Assignment
We’re humans, we like certainty.
In fact, we crave certainty of event outcomes that probabilistic models and horserace polling simply can’t give us.
Whether a single poll, many polls aggregated together, or many polls aggregated together and then combined with other important components of elections (forecasting “models” like 538, Silver Bullet, etc) statistics can only take us so far in predicting election outcomes.
Why?
Well, because even as Nate Silver would tell you, low probability events still occur (think Trump 2016) and because horserace election polling is constrained by unavoidable errors and biases even when done well, including the margin of error, that prevent us from being able to say with certainty which way a race that will be decided by 1 or 2% will end up actually breaking
Like Hitler, Trump Has Made Clear His Plan is Dictatorship, Not Democracy
January 30th 1933 dawned cold and clear in Berlin as Adolph Hitler took his oath of office and promised Germans he would uphold the constitution. It would ultimately take him less than 30 days to dismantle it.
By March, Dachau concentration camp was opened with its inaugural prisoners: members of the Communist and Social Democrat parties and other prominent Hitler critics. including some members of the Reichstag which Hitler’s allies would join with the National Socialists to voluntarily dissolve to give Hitler near total power.
From the Holocaust Encyclopedia:
“Nazi persecution of political opponents exacted a terrible price in human suffering. Between 1933 and 1939, the criminal courts sentenced tens of thousands of Germans for "political crimes." If the police were confident of a conviction in court, the prisoner was turned over to the justice system for trial. If the police were unsatisfied with the outcome of criminal proceedings they would take the acquitted citizen or the citizen who was sentenced to a suspended sentence into protective detention and incarcerate him or her in a concentration camp.”