Excellent article. Old lady here. Veteran. Protester. Actively engaged democratic volunteer. Is it enough? Nope. Not a Californian anymore, but still donating to the redistricting efforts. Enough? Nope. Keep going. Take breaks when needed. But keep being vocal. Keep being seen. Hand out red cards to the vulnerable. Wearing my shirt today, “They want 1939 Germany. Let’s give them 1789 France.” Goes great with my guillotine earrings (gift from a friend). Keep on keeping on. Defend the Constitution and human rights.
I'm reminded of a quote from an interview several years ago about a women's rights activist in Egypt . She was constantly getting harassed by the government there and as well as receiving endless death threats from Islamic fundamentalists. At the end of the article, the questioner asked her how she dealt with any fear.
She essentially said the following (I'm paraphrasing): "When you live with courage, you can only die once; when you live in fear, you die a thousand deaths every day". I've clung to that statement as one of several anchors to maintain my equilibrium against this threat we're all facing. I'm not saying it's the solution to anyone's understandable fears, but I believe it's vital to figure out internally and externally what's best to confront our fears and do what's necessary to take back our country.
That is also a wisdom expressed (a long time ago) in a Shakespeare play-- I think Julius Caesar.
It reminds me of the way our minds can go into free fall when we confront uncertainty. We spend more energy fearing-and-avoiding a fight than we would fighting! And in not-fighting, we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to win.
Absolutely correct. This is the missing element that far too liberals, Democrats, progressives, even Republicans don't grasp. The longer you allow your fear to destabilize you, the more you lose access to your power, cede power to the other side and clarity of purpose and vision. trump and crew bear their fangs at us and our first reaction is to jump when it should be to remain steadfast and never waver whatsoever.
You can rant, Mike. Good on ya, guy. Here's mine from this morning.
October 1, 2025
With a heartfelt apology to MLKJr for borrowing without permission . . .
"I had a dream last night . . ."
I had spent my 12-hour day yesterday, September 30, listening to the morning's speeches at Quantico where 60 or so years years before the woman who would become my wife and the mother of our children bobbed at anchor in my new sailboat waiting for a tow to dislodge us from a Potomac River sandbank and resume our journey to an Annapolis mooring.
In that dream last night I was walking, cane in hand -- wandering, really -- through a two or three-square mile sea of crushed and bull-dozed rubble, stacked bricks and concrete blocks, caves of hollowed out concrete, here and there occasional tangles of downed dead trees in front of smaller, desolate century-or-more-old buildings subtly highlighting the barrenness of the flattened crushed remains. After each brief pause or exploration I'd resume my strolling in, around, sometime under that white or crushed-grey environment. At one point, in the distance, I could see a long contracting, expanding line of Gen Z young (relatively speaking) people trudging toward a huge cargo ship tied parallel to the rubble field, looming uo over it. The dream seemed interminable. It, too, meandered, bleak, barren, then renewed, resumed.
I had slept right through sunrise, was almost late for breakfast, but not before recognizing, immediately I vegan dressing myself, how yesterday's trials were the obvious trigger for what I had recreated during what was supposed to be an evening's respite from the day before. I suspect this brand new memory will stick with me even as December 7, 1941 in our Brooklyn apartment a quarter mile from the Navy Yard, has witnessing my mother's shock and anguish as to the whereabouts of my older sister's absence for a pack of Juicy Fruit gum well within the range of sea-based Axis U-boats known to be just off shore.
I suspect this brand new memory will stick with me for whatever time I have left, even as December 7, 1941 in our Brooklyn apartment a quarter mile from the Navy Yard, has stuck with me as I witnessed my mother's shock, her near frantic anguish, over the whereabouts of my older sister out pursuing a pack of Juicy Fruit gum, well within the range of the feared U-boats known to be operating off shore. I was otherwise too young to understand all that.
My current memories, for as long as they exist, are comprehensive, clear, and many-faceted. When I am gone I will have done what I could. Now, the Trump shutdown ("don't any of you talk with them") of our Federal Government has occurred.
What does it take to silence a tyrant? Look at the news footage from Eastern Europe after the fall of the USSR. Look at Poland. Look at the Arab Spring. It takes 100,000 people in the streets of every major city; one million in DC if you can. Peaceful but implacable. That will give spine to the spineless representatives in the Capitol. Nothing else will shame or scare them into doing the right thing.
One note of reassurance: in Trumpland, nothing lasts. Within 24 hours the script will flip again, because chaos is all they know. That instability isn’t power—it’s weakness. It means their grip on control is fragile, their agenda unsustainable, and their movement destined to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.
This is an excellent perspective. The growing unpopularity of this regime combined with the wholesale destruction of the economy AND the safety net will steadily enrage more and more people to actively stand up against this perfidy.
I’m 83 but I don’t know what to do. I’ve been trying to have open conversation with my MAGA friends/family to help them see another side but they are so indoctrinated, my view falls on deaf ears. They can “support” their view by the data, etc they’ve been told, like Charlie Kirk did. Most of them never heard of Charlie Kirk before he was killed. So they didn’t know about his hate speech. No I don’t hate Charlie Kirk, (hate the sin, not the sinner) he thought he was doing good. He was just seriously misguided. That’s true of Trump and his followers.
So the answer is “love our “enemies” and forgive them. There’s more power in love. That’s all I know to do, follow the teachings of Jesus and somehow our country will be saved. I pray that I will be guided on what to do to preserve our democracy without violence of any kind. Or hate. Maybe James Talarico can save us!
Ps. When you stop and think how the success of the Civil Rights movement was won, which was Blacks forgiving the injustice committed against Blacks, and the message of Love that MLK Jr preached, and his insistence on promoting peaceful ways to accomplish the Constitutional rights of Black people, in spite of violence committed against them at the time, it proves to me that Love conquers all! Love will heal the divisions and hate and even the “misguided ideas” of the far-right! Cooperation and Compromise and Compassion will lead our country once more and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!❤️
I understand your perspective, but I will strongly disagree with you. Black people did not forgive the hatred visited upon us. MLK preached non-violence both as a moral stand but also as an effective political strategy to expose and undermine the ugly politics of the Jim Crow regime. He deliberately copied that approach from Gandhi who used it to gain independence for India from the British. Yes, MLK preached a glorious vision of what this country could and should be about, but I don't believe or recall him explicitly using love as the foundation of his rhetoric.
I suspect I have more insight into the general mindset of black people than you do (I am assuming you are not a black person so correct me if I am wrong here). I think I can say with a high level of confidence that the belief that the power of love alone generated the success of the Civil Rights movement does not exist among African Americans. I believe the more accurate perspective among black Americans was that it's was the struggle and sacrifice sometimes literally in blood, including MLK's assassination, that helped us gain our rights. I'm not trying to be cynical or rain on anyone's parade, but that's the blunt reality of how things have played out.
See my post when you get a chance. Tomorrow I'll be six years older than you. I was raised in a Christian church but left organized religion when I realized the rarity of the performance as against what was preached. Nellis and Longwell, Vance and Richardson, Last and (fill in the name of other truth tellers here) are my preachers. It's very hard to love one's enemies, especially when they are particularly nasty, brutish, or short, but I do try.
Perge! (meaning persist, a motto from an organization once belonged to.
Happy birthday tomorrow! Have a great celebration and remember, there’s a lot of good left in this country to celebrate too.
I understand your feelings about organized religion, especially the Christian Nationalism” version! I’ll check out your post. (Do I have to subscribe?)
Thank you, and no you don't. I'm a cheapskate who believes "turnabout is always fair play." I'm tapped out myself from subscribing, and would never put a price on my words.. Accordingly, I really try to be careful about what I say. But then, I only post my comments, not on my "site" (whatever that might be, being a newbie) and try to be very judicious about who and where I place them. E.g. it's on Mike Nellis' and Bill Kristol's..
You are absolutely right, I am white, so I guess it’s from a white perspective that I remember those turbulent times. And I agree with your other statements about Gandhi and the Black struggles that are occurring even today.
I was very young at the time of the Civil Rights movement, and actually very scared. I was so afraid of civil war breaking out again on the streets. It did I guess in places. My mother had told me about a story of her as a teen seeing a wagon filled with dead Blacks rolling down the streets, I believe in Dallas. It was probably in the early 1900’s. It was horrifying. We feared something like that could happen again.
That’s why I was so grateful and relieved and why I would cry at MLK’s speeches, because he was preaching peace and I do remember several times where he talked about love.
I felt that gave our country a chance at not only avoiding violence, but achieving equality for Blacks.
I’m not trying to be argumentative with you about whether he talked about love or not, I’m just explaining what I hung onto because of my fear of widespread killings. That’s the impression I had of MLK, he was a man of God who tried to live his Christian faith, not just preach it. Jesus taught from Love, not retribution, not revenge.
I felt that Blacks had a right to feel revenge, feel even hatred, but they did not act on it! I interpreted that as forgiveness.
This is what I remember MLK saying:
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.”
I guess I just assumed everything he said came from his belief in the power of love. It doesn’t mean we just sit back and do nothing in the face of injustice. It means we try to see the good God put in each of us and appeal to that. If we see only the evil that someone is expressing, and retaliate against that, then we are no better than they are and lose any chance to harmonize our country.
I am struggling to practice what I’m preaching. I do know some MAGA followers personally and they are good people who would never say or do what Trump says. So it’s an enigma why they support him. But I still have to “love my neighbor.” That good part of them that God created. And that includes …….Trump.
A national strike like those which people engage in in other countries . Shutting down the federal government no longer has a dramatic impact. Shutting down a country may force Trump's hand but it is better than a slow bleed and it may break the stalemate. Trump is really afraid of us and we should stop being afraid of him.
Everyday we have been bombarded with one issue or another, with lies, lawsuits, fighting, threats and the continuous attempt at dividing us. Now we are being attacked with the notion of, “the enemy within” so we need military on our streets. Don’t be fooled this is authoritarian behavior and has been. You bet it’s hard, tiresome and scary - it’s meant to be. We can and will continue to stand up to this attempt to destroy Democracy. Take strength from those who are advocating, the courts and those that encourage and support - we can do this, together.
Trump has totally changed the narrative, Epstein is no longer a topic. This population likes shinny new things Epstein and rich pedophiles has lost its allure. Now all the talk are troops to the cities masked gangs of government thugs in cities like Portland that truly don't need troops in there city. Look out for what you wish for one day this government will be sending armed military to a city near you. The government doesn't even attempt to better peoples lives any longer they just want to put the fear of god in you, even though they truly know not nor care not for religion.
Barry Goldwater said this more than 40 years ago. He was bang on. “ Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.”
There’s not really very much I can add to that. As I’ve written before, this was all obvious to me 47 years ago when Anita Bryant raised her well-coiffed reptilian snout above a Florida swamp and started lying and lying and lying about gay people. To this day, I tend to doubt it was very little about gay people actually, more about her then Husband, and definitely about her desire to be a power within the southern Baptist convention. Can I prove it? No, but I have been listening to these people for more than 50 years.
As I wrote the other day, I really don’t know what to do except what I have been doing. I don’t think that they’re interested in any kind of reconciliation, no matter who proposes it. I don’t think they’re interested in the truth. They’re interested in power, money, religious dominion, And in the age of Trump, revenge. And I was writing that long before Trump rode down that golden escalator.
1/3 of this country is disconnected from reality. 1/3 of this country voted Democratic. And 1/3 of this country doesn’t give a crap except what’s on Netflix next week. And that’s for whatever reasons they might have.
Germany had to go through World War II to deal with its fascist problem. I don’t know what we’re going to have to go through, but I don’t think it’s going to either be peaceful or nice. My hope is that if it crashes and burns enough, maybe enough of the disconnected minority will care.
And maybe enough of the 1/3 of the country that’s disconnected from reality will hurt enough to get off their asses and learn something. But frankly, I’m not convinced that’s going to happen. Red states have been voting Republican for 50 years, and despite that, they still ranked at the lowest of every measure of social well-being— economy, jobs, teenage pregnancy, poverty, maternal mortality, education, you name it. If they haven’t noticed that voting Republican for the last 50 years has not made their lives better, how would you expect the Democrats to message them in such a way that they would change their mind about voting Republican?
Look at the invasion of our cities. By our own military. The second amendment nut cases have been claiming for years that they need to have as many guns of whatever kind as they wish without any restriction whatsoever in order to fight off a tyrannical and overbearing federal government. That has been the claim. And yet, here we have a tyrannical and overbearing federal government, and where are the Second Amendment nutcases to be found?
Nowhere.
One guy told me that because of the big beautiful tax Bill, he’s able to keep much more of his income and not pay it out in taxes. I pointed out the prices are going up on everything. He’s not keeping more of his income. That didn’t impress him.
I don’t have an answer for this. I will do what I can, but I don’t think that there’s much that I can do. I just have to hope that none of this affects me directly or anyone I love.
No one of us can do much at all. Collectively--that's a different and much more important story.
I hope you get yourself connected to your local Indivisible.org group, or start one if there isn't one near you. Because together we can and will bring about good change.
As Indivisible keeps pointing out, we don't need to convince or convert even 33% of the population. We need to activate around 3.5% to engage in sustained and cooperative resistance.
The Dems are not speaking to what people care about. They do not care about transgender bathrooms, they do not care about what is going on in Israel, after all it is a foreign country. They do not care about giving jobs to undocumented workers, because they themselves cannot get a job, all the undocumented workers are taking the jobs of legal residence and citizens because the employer can pay the illegals less. Therefore regular working people the backbone of our country are unemployed and they are angry and I understand why.
You are blindsided by living in a big city with options that many of us do not have! I have lived in Raleigh, NC for the past nine years where the Republican party, and a mean, self serving, discriminating party at that, has immense power and illegally bullies its way to cripple this state.
I protest, campaign for candidates, spend much of my Federal Survivor’s benefits income on supporting reformative candidates but what else would you have me do? Before you broadly rant, keep in mind that you are also speaking to those of us who live in much different circumstances as you!
Endless Urgency is a firm spot in my daily routine. You and your guests provide valued content. But like today, you do not speak nationally.
Excellent article. Old lady here. Veteran. Protester. Actively engaged democratic volunteer. Is it enough? Nope. Not a Californian anymore, but still donating to the redistricting efforts. Enough? Nope. Keep going. Take breaks when needed. But keep being vocal. Keep being seen. Hand out red cards to the vulnerable. Wearing my shirt today, “They want 1939 Germany. Let’s give them 1789 France.” Goes great with my guillotine earrings (gift from a friend). Keep on keeping on. Defend the Constitution and human rights.
Make sure you take care of yourself
Thank you Mike
And not just once but every day until the outrages are corrected.
I'm reminded of a quote from an interview several years ago about a women's rights activist in Egypt . She was constantly getting harassed by the government there and as well as receiving endless death threats from Islamic fundamentalists. At the end of the article, the questioner asked her how she dealt with any fear.
She essentially said the following (I'm paraphrasing): "When you live with courage, you can only die once; when you live in fear, you die a thousand deaths every day". I've clung to that statement as one of several anchors to maintain my equilibrium against this threat we're all facing. I'm not saying it's the solution to anyone's understandable fears, but I believe it's vital to figure out internally and externally what's best to confront our fears and do what's necessary to take back our country.
Damn. That's profound
Sure is....that's why I mentally reference it all the time.
That is also a wisdom expressed (a long time ago) in a Shakespeare play-- I think Julius Caesar.
It reminds me of the way our minds can go into free fall when we confront uncertainty. We spend more energy fearing-and-avoiding a fight than we would fighting! And in not-fighting, we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to win.
Absolutely correct. This is the missing element that far too liberals, Democrats, progressives, even Republicans don't grasp. The longer you allow your fear to destabilize you, the more you lose access to your power, cede power to the other side and clarity of purpose and vision. trump and crew bear their fangs at us and our first reaction is to jump when it should be to remain steadfast and never waver whatsoever.
You can rant, Mike. Good on ya, guy. Here's mine from this morning.
October 1, 2025
With a heartfelt apology to MLKJr for borrowing without permission . . .
"I had a dream last night . . ."
I had spent my 12-hour day yesterday, September 30, listening to the morning's speeches at Quantico where 60 or so years years before the woman who would become my wife and the mother of our children bobbed at anchor in my new sailboat waiting for a tow to dislodge us from a Potomac River sandbank and resume our journey to an Annapolis mooring.
In that dream last night I was walking, cane in hand -- wandering, really -- through a two or three-square mile sea of crushed and bull-dozed rubble, stacked bricks and concrete blocks, caves of hollowed out concrete, here and there occasional tangles of downed dead trees in front of smaller, desolate century-or-more-old buildings subtly highlighting the barrenness of the flattened crushed remains. After each brief pause or exploration I'd resume my strolling in, around, sometime under that white or crushed-grey environment. At one point, in the distance, I could see a long contracting, expanding line of Gen Z young (relatively speaking) people trudging toward a huge cargo ship tied parallel to the rubble field, looming uo over it. The dream seemed interminable. It, too, meandered, bleak, barren, then renewed, resumed.
I had slept right through sunrise, was almost late for breakfast, but not before recognizing, immediately I vegan dressing myself, how yesterday's trials were the obvious trigger for what I had recreated during what was supposed to be an evening's respite from the day before. I suspect this brand new memory will stick with me even as December 7, 1941 in our Brooklyn apartment a quarter mile from the Navy Yard, has witnessing my mother's shock and anguish as to the whereabouts of my older sister's absence for a pack of Juicy Fruit gum well within the range of sea-based Axis U-boats known to be just off shore.
I suspect this brand new memory will stick with me for whatever time I have left, even as December 7, 1941 in our Brooklyn apartment a quarter mile from the Navy Yard, has stuck with me as I witnessed my mother's shock, her near frantic anguish, over the whereabouts of my older sister out pursuing a pack of Juicy Fruit gum, well within the range of the feared U-boats known to be operating off shore. I was otherwise too young to understand all that.
My current memories, for as long as they exist, are comprehensive, clear, and many-faceted. When I am gone I will have done what I could. Now, the Trump shutdown ("don't any of you talk with them") of our Federal Government has occurred.
Been ranting since I came out of the womb lol
What does it take to silence a tyrant? Look at the news footage from Eastern Europe after the fall of the USSR. Look at Poland. Look at the Arab Spring. It takes 100,000 people in the streets of every major city; one million in DC if you can. Peaceful but implacable. That will give spine to the spineless representatives in the Capitol. Nothing else will shame or scare them into doing the right thing.
One note of reassurance: in Trumpland, nothing lasts. Within 24 hours the script will flip again, because chaos is all they know. That instability isn’t power—it’s weakness. It means their grip on control is fragile, their agenda unsustainable, and their movement destined to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.
You’re doing an exceptional job!
This is an excellent perspective. The growing unpopularity of this regime combined with the wholesale destruction of the economy AND the safety net will steadily enrage more and more people to actively stand up against this perfidy.
I’m 83 but I don’t know what to do. I’ve been trying to have open conversation with my MAGA friends/family to help them see another side but they are so indoctrinated, my view falls on deaf ears. They can “support” their view by the data, etc they’ve been told, like Charlie Kirk did. Most of them never heard of Charlie Kirk before he was killed. So they didn’t know about his hate speech. No I don’t hate Charlie Kirk, (hate the sin, not the sinner) he thought he was doing good. He was just seriously misguided. That’s true of Trump and his followers.
So the answer is “love our “enemies” and forgive them. There’s more power in love. That’s all I know to do, follow the teachings of Jesus and somehow our country will be saved. I pray that I will be guided on what to do to preserve our democracy without violence of any kind. Or hate. Maybe James Talarico can save us!
Ps. When you stop and think how the success of the Civil Rights movement was won, which was Blacks forgiving the injustice committed against Blacks, and the message of Love that MLK Jr preached, and his insistence on promoting peaceful ways to accomplish the Constitutional rights of Black people, in spite of violence committed against them at the time, it proves to me that Love conquers all! Love will heal the divisions and hate and even the “misguided ideas” of the far-right! Cooperation and Compromise and Compassion will lead our country once more and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!❤️
I understand your perspective, but I will strongly disagree with you. Black people did not forgive the hatred visited upon us. MLK preached non-violence both as a moral stand but also as an effective political strategy to expose and undermine the ugly politics of the Jim Crow regime. He deliberately copied that approach from Gandhi who used it to gain independence for India from the British. Yes, MLK preached a glorious vision of what this country could and should be about, but I don't believe or recall him explicitly using love as the foundation of his rhetoric.
I suspect I have more insight into the general mindset of black people than you do (I am assuming you are not a black person so correct me if I am wrong here). I think I can say with a high level of confidence that the belief that the power of love alone generated the success of the Civil Rights movement does not exist among African Americans. I believe the more accurate perspective among black Americans was that it's was the struggle and sacrifice sometimes literally in blood, including MLK's assassination, that helped us gain our rights. I'm not trying to be cynical or rain on anyone's parade, but that's the blunt reality of how things have played out.
See my post when you get a chance. Tomorrow I'll be six years older than you. I was raised in a Christian church but left organized religion when I realized the rarity of the performance as against what was preached. Nellis and Longwell, Vance and Richardson, Last and (fill in the name of other truth tellers here) are my preachers. It's very hard to love one's enemies, especially when they are particularly nasty, brutish, or short, but I do try.
Perge! (meaning persist, a motto from an organization once belonged to.
Happy birthday tomorrow! Have a great celebration and remember, there’s a lot of good left in this country to celebrate too.
I understand your feelings about organized religion, especially the Christian Nationalism” version! I’ll check out your post. (Do I have to subscribe?)
Thank you, and no you don't. I'm a cheapskate who believes "turnabout is always fair play." I'm tapped out myself from subscribing, and would never put a price on my words.. Accordingly, I really try to be careful about what I say. But then, I only post my comments, not on my "site" (whatever that might be, being a newbie) and try to be very judicious about who and where I place them. E.g. it's on Mike Nellis' and Bill Kristol's..
You are absolutely right, I am white, so I guess it’s from a white perspective that I remember those turbulent times. And I agree with your other statements about Gandhi and the Black struggles that are occurring even today.
I was very young at the time of the Civil Rights movement, and actually very scared. I was so afraid of civil war breaking out again on the streets. It did I guess in places. My mother had told me about a story of her as a teen seeing a wagon filled with dead Blacks rolling down the streets, I believe in Dallas. It was probably in the early 1900’s. It was horrifying. We feared something like that could happen again.
That’s why I was so grateful and relieved and why I would cry at MLK’s speeches, because he was preaching peace and I do remember several times where he talked about love.
I felt that gave our country a chance at not only avoiding violence, but achieving equality for Blacks.
I’m not trying to be argumentative with you about whether he talked about love or not, I’m just explaining what I hung onto because of my fear of widespread killings. That’s the impression I had of MLK, he was a man of God who tried to live his Christian faith, not just preach it. Jesus taught from Love, not retribution, not revenge.
I felt that Blacks had a right to feel revenge, feel even hatred, but they did not act on it! I interpreted that as forgiveness.
This is what I remember MLK saying:
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.”
I guess I just assumed everything he said came from his belief in the power of love. It doesn’t mean we just sit back and do nothing in the face of injustice. It means we try to see the good God put in each of us and appeal to that. If we see only the evil that someone is expressing, and retaliate against that, then we are no better than they are and lose any chance to harmonize our country.
I am struggling to practice what I’m preaching. I do know some MAGA followers personally and they are good people who would never say or do what Trump says. So it’s an enigma why they support him. But I still have to “love my neighbor.” That good part of them that God created. And that includes …….Trump.
A national strike like those which people engage in in other countries . Shutting down the federal government no longer has a dramatic impact. Shutting down a country may force Trump's hand but it is better than a slow bleed and it may break the stalemate. Trump is really afraid of us and we should stop being afraid of him.
Everyday we have been bombarded with one issue or another, with lies, lawsuits, fighting, threats and the continuous attempt at dividing us. Now we are being attacked with the notion of, “the enemy within” so we need military on our streets. Don’t be fooled this is authoritarian behavior and has been. You bet it’s hard, tiresome and scary - it’s meant to be. We can and will continue to stand up to this attempt to destroy Democracy. Take strength from those who are advocating, the courts and those that encourage and support - we can do this, together.
Trump has totally changed the narrative, Epstein is no longer a topic. This population likes shinny new things Epstein and rich pedophiles has lost its allure. Now all the talk are troops to the cities masked gangs of government thugs in cities like Portland that truly don't need troops in there city. Look out for what you wish for one day this government will be sending armed military to a city near you. The government doesn't even attempt to better peoples lives any longer they just want to put the fear of god in you, even though they truly know not nor care not for religion.
Whoa. Do you know the concept of "patience"?
'This population' wants problems solved *now* and that ain't gonna happen.
We can keep two-- or five-- thoughts in our heads at the same time.
I don't know about you, but no woman of my acquaintance is going to forget about Epstein.
Chump is scared to death Democrats will take back the House. He should be. That's what we must work toward.
Barry Goldwater said this more than 40 years ago. He was bang on. “ Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.”
There’s not really very much I can add to that. As I’ve written before, this was all obvious to me 47 years ago when Anita Bryant raised her well-coiffed reptilian snout above a Florida swamp and started lying and lying and lying about gay people. To this day, I tend to doubt it was very little about gay people actually, more about her then Husband, and definitely about her desire to be a power within the southern Baptist convention. Can I prove it? No, but I have been listening to these people for more than 50 years.
As I wrote the other day, I really don’t know what to do except what I have been doing. I don’t think that they’re interested in any kind of reconciliation, no matter who proposes it. I don’t think they’re interested in the truth. They’re interested in power, money, religious dominion, And in the age of Trump, revenge. And I was writing that long before Trump rode down that golden escalator.
1/3 of this country is disconnected from reality. 1/3 of this country voted Democratic. And 1/3 of this country doesn’t give a crap except what’s on Netflix next week. And that’s for whatever reasons they might have.
Germany had to go through World War II to deal with its fascist problem. I don’t know what we’re going to have to go through, but I don’t think it’s going to either be peaceful or nice. My hope is that if it crashes and burns enough, maybe enough of the disconnected minority will care.
And maybe enough of the 1/3 of the country that’s disconnected from reality will hurt enough to get off their asses and learn something. But frankly, I’m not convinced that’s going to happen. Red states have been voting Republican for 50 years, and despite that, they still ranked at the lowest of every measure of social well-being— economy, jobs, teenage pregnancy, poverty, maternal mortality, education, you name it. If they haven’t noticed that voting Republican for the last 50 years has not made their lives better, how would you expect the Democrats to message them in such a way that they would change their mind about voting Republican?
Look at the invasion of our cities. By our own military. The second amendment nut cases have been claiming for years that they need to have as many guns of whatever kind as they wish without any restriction whatsoever in order to fight off a tyrannical and overbearing federal government. That has been the claim. And yet, here we have a tyrannical and overbearing federal government, and where are the Second Amendment nutcases to be found?
Nowhere.
One guy told me that because of the big beautiful tax Bill, he’s able to keep much more of his income and not pay it out in taxes. I pointed out the prices are going up on everything. He’s not keeping more of his income. That didn’t impress him.
I don’t have an answer for this. I will do what I can, but I don’t think that there’s much that I can do. I just have to hope that none of this affects me directly or anyone I love.
No one of us can do much at all. Collectively--that's a different and much more important story.
I hope you get yourself connected to your local Indivisible.org group, or start one if there isn't one near you. Because together we can and will bring about good change.
As Indivisible keeps pointing out, we don't need to convince or convert even 33% of the population. We need to activate around 3.5% to engage in sustained and cooperative resistance.
I hope it works.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Thanks, Mike. You and Sarah Longwell are a great team.
The Dems are not speaking to what people care about. They do not care about transgender bathrooms, they do not care about what is going on in Israel, after all it is a foreign country. They do not care about giving jobs to undocumented workers, because they themselves cannot get a job, all the undocumented workers are taking the jobs of legal residence and citizens because the employer can pay the illegals less. Therefore regular working people the backbone of our country are unemployed and they are angry and I understand why.
You are blindsided by living in a big city with options that many of us do not have! I have lived in Raleigh, NC for the past nine years where the Republican party, and a mean, self serving, discriminating party at that, has immense power and illegally bullies its way to cripple this state.
I protest, campaign for candidates, spend much of my Federal Survivor’s benefits income on supporting reformative candidates but what else would you have me do? Before you broadly rant, keep in mind that you are also speaking to those of us who live in much different circumstances as you!
Endless Urgency is a firm spot in my daily routine. You and your guests provide valued content. But like today, you do not speak nationally.
I’ll tune you in tomorrow, but I expect better.