Thanksgiving is over (even if leftovers may not be). It’s time to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and get to resisting what’s coming. Spocko has gotten after that message with both ears.
False narratives that sold half the country on Trumpism were not born yesterday. It took time, billions of oligarch money, and repetition, repetition, repetition. Propaganda succeeded, among other things, in convincing people that illegal immigration (a misdemeanor, first offense) was a “crisis” best dealt with by a career criminal with 34 felony convictions, dozens of other grand jury indictments (including for inciting an insurrection and theft of state secrets), and a civil penalty for sexual assault. Courts liquidated Donald Trump’s charitable foundation as a fraud, dismantled his “university” as a fraud as well, and banned him from doing business in the state of New York.
How the hell could Americans hire that guy as chief executive of the United States of America? A second time?
The answer, says Andrea Pitzer of the new Next Comes What podcast, is simple: propaganda works. Pitzer, author of “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps,” studied the rise of concentration camps as a means of controlling large groups of “undesirables” with a small number of guards. The invention of barbed wire and automatic weapons helped the practice along. Take note. Trump 2.0 plans to erect them on the southern border.
Olivia Troye is now a regular guest on cable news networks not in the grip of the MAGA cult. Her experiences as Homeland Security and Counterterrorism advisor to Vice President Mike Pence during the Tump administration left her both changed and politcally homeless. Troye’s Thanksgiving message reminded me of another story of political transformation I once witnessed.
I’m especially grateful for the incredible gift of finding a new tribe. Taking a stand has often left me in political no-man’s land, but in that space, I’ve discovered something profound—a community of people like you. Your support, courage, and shared belief in doing what’s right have reminded me that I’m not alone. Together, we are building something stronger than partisanship: a tribe rooted in shared values, integrity, and hope for the future. Thank you for being my tribe.
Gratitude is a powerful force, but its true strength lies in its ability to inspire us to be better—for ourselves, one another, and the country we love.
That’s something we can all be thankful for.
Before MAGA came the T-party. Many on the right erupted into into paroxysms of rage at the election in 2008 of the country’s first Black president. Before Trumpism and red hats, the T-party cosplayed as revolutionary war soldiers. They pretended their loud protests had to do with tax policy and not white freakout at having to share power with people designated untouchables by European settlers 400 years ago.
The party’s reactionary turn unnerved a couple of local activists who, like Troye, began moving away from the county Republican Party. A few years later, the former chapter chair of Republican Women decided to run for county commission as an independent. It was a district in which Democrats failed to field a candidate. We offered to help.
At the end of her first monthly meeting with us, she stood, and through tears expressed gratitude for our help and her welcome. And great relief.
“Y’all are actually doing something!” she said with some surprise. (We had not spent our meeting badmouthing Republicans.) We had our own goals, plans for action, and a positive agenda. Like Troye, she and her husband had found a new tribe. That break took guts. Today they are friends.
Half the country just chose to align themselves with the tribe my friends left a decade ago. The sadness in that is profound. But there is hope too. Not everyone on the right is there for Trumpism. Some are there out of political muscle memory. Welcome them when they turn.
Last Wednesday I wrote about Democrats fear of fighting back. I linked to a video from my friend Cliff Schecter. We’ve been talking about what fighting back looks like. I’m going to share some examples here next week with specifics. Today Cliff shares an example, Gavin Newsom.
Yes we were all horrified by Trump’s win. But at some point we get back up and fight. Newsom’s response has been chef’s kiss. No Trump congratulations. You accept the results, but rip him to cameras, point out it was a puny win, he’s no king and still an asshole. You call a special legislative session to bolster legal defenses and garner media coverage of your message!
You go to D.C., meet with Democratic reps and President Biden–not Trump. You know it’ll piss him off and he doesn’t deserve the photo op. The coup de gras? Newsom’s using a Trump threat to justify harming Apartheid Man-Baby’s business, which should help kick the inevitable Musk vs. Trump clash into gear. Watch the video for that one and all the rest, as we learn to fight the tyrants.
And be sure after you watch to SUBSCRIBE to Cliff’s Edge, which is quickly becoming a leading resistance outlet on Youtube we’ll need over the next four years!
I know I did this last week but all this footage came over the Xitter yesterday (pretty much the only feeds I follow there anymore…) and I enjoyed them so much I’m doing it again:
I have my issues with Sen. John Fetterman these days. He’s certainly marching to his own drummer. But he’s right about one thing: Democrats need to chill out about their “rebrand” or whatever the hell they are obsessing over today. It’s premature, tiresome, probably unnecessary (at least to the extent they seem to think it is, Trump didn’t win a landslide and his coattails were pathetic. Dems turned more House seats than they did!)
Anyway, the NY Times inteviewed him and he has a lot to say, only ;some of which I agree with. He does go on and on about how to appeal to the “bros” which reminds me of earlier laments about how to appeal to “soccer moms” and Nascar Dads.” It’s always somebody that Democrats are allegedly condescending to and looking down on. This time, it seems to me that the “problem” as these guys see it is too much woman stuff. Abortion was a loser and all those women at the convention and a woman nominee as just too much. No more women! It appears to me that Fetterman more or less agrees with that which doesn’t surprise me.
This is the specific part I’m referencing above:
Senator John Fetterman wasn’t in Washington for the first Trump administration. But he has a few ideas about how Democrats should handle the second.
He wants his party to accept its losses. He wants his party to chill out a little. And he wants his party to please stop with all the hot takes about what went wrong in November, since Democrats have four long years to figure it out.
[…]
How do you think the Democratic Party needs to change right now?
I don’t give advice except on fashion. Again, I want to thank your publication for putting me on the best-dressed list, so you understand why I am a fashion plate.
Do Democrats need to do an analysis of what went wrong? And, if so, who should do it?
We’re not even at Thanksgiving, and Democrats just can’t stop losing our minds every fifteen minutes. We really need to pace ourselves, or, you know, for FFS, just grab a grip. Realize that this is how elections go. At least for the next two years, they’re going to have the opportunity to write the narrative and to drive the narrative.
Trump is assembling a cabinet of people many Democrats find deeply objectionable. How do you think Democrats should respond?
I’m just saying, buckle up and pack a lunch, because it’s going to be four years of this. And if you have a choice to freak out, you know, on the hour, then that’s your right. But I will not. I’m not that dude, and I’m not that Democrat. I’m going to pick my fights. If you freak out on everything, you lose any kind of relevance.
Do you think Democrats have done too much freaking out when it comes to Trump?
It’s symbiotic. One feeds off the other. The Democrats can’t resist a freakout, and that must be the wind under the wings for Trump.
It sounds like you want Democrats to be quiet and let Republicans have their own fight.
All I’m saying is, the freakout and all the anxiety and all that should have been before Nov. 5.
Does clutching the pearls so hard — does that change anything? Did it work? Did it change the election? Was it productive? And, like, I can’t believe the outrage. That has to be candy for Trump.
You said Democrats needed to pick their battles. What’s one you’d choose?
I’m not going to pick one before Thanksgiving.
One analysis of the election that we’ve heard from your colleague Senator Bernie Sanders is that Democrats failed to recognize how bad people were feeling about the economy, about the country generally, and failed to name a villain. Do you agree with that analysis?
I do not.
Why?
I think there was a lot of other issues. I would even describe them as cultural. Walk around in Scranton, tell me what an oligarch is. I think it’s like, “Whose argument is the closest match to the kinds of things that are important to me?” And I think some of them are rooted in gender and worldviews, and even backlash of things like cancel culture.
I witness people, now there’s specific kinds of clothing. They call it Blue Collar Patriots. I’m willing to bet you know who they’re voting for.
And why is that? I don’t think it’s because we haven’t talked enough about oligarchs, and how it’s rigged.
What do you think Democrats need to do to bring about the kind of cultural shift you’re talking about?
For a party that’s had way too many bad takes, we should take our time.
This I agree with. I wish everyone would just take a beat and let the data come in and think a little bit. There’s just way too much of everyone (including me) fitting what needs to be done to their priors. We need to let things settle. Focus on immediate problems we may be able to affect, which isn’t much.
We all need to relax for a bit. It’s going to be a long four years.
I legit think the cynical promotion of this this is one of the most brazen acts of public evil I’ve ever seen because there is *no tradeoff* in any way that counts, there’s no complicated externality, it’s just fucking letting people, mainly children die for the hell of it.
This is all based on disinformation spread by right wing conspiracy theorists and idiot woo-woo lefties. It’s the most grotesque example of the political horseshoe ever.
Yes, Big Pharma has a lot to answer for. The price of drugs is a crime. We really should do something about it. But to exploit a genuine concern for political gain by pushing vconspiracy theories that kill children is almost too much to bear.
This story is a reminder of where we’re going with this:
In November 2019, when an epidemic of measles was killing children and babies in Samoa, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who in recent days became Donald Trump’s pick to lead the department of Health and Human Services — sent the prime minister of Samoa a four-page letter. In it, he suggested the measles vaccine itself may have caused the outbreak.
He claimed that the vaccine might have “failed to produce antibodies” in vaccinated mothers sufficient to provide infants with immunity, that it perhaps provoked “the evolution of more virulent measles strains” and that children who received the vaccine may have inadvertently spread the virus to other children. “Please do not hesitate to contact me if I can be of any assistance,” he added, writing in his role as the chairman of Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group.
At the time of his letter, 16 people, many of them younger than 2, were already reported dead. Measles, which is among the most contagious diseases, can sometimes lead to brain swelling, pneumonia and death. For months, families grieved over heartbreaking little coffins, until a door-to-door vaccination campaign brought the calamity to a close. The final number of fatalities topped 80.
RFK was completely wrong. Most of the dead were under 4 years old.
I’m including a gift link to that entire article, written by a journalist who covered the story in real time. He and others had been strongly pushing disinformation about vaccines for some time in the area. The results were catastrophic.
Unfortunately, as those maps above show, it’s already happening here even without Kennedy and his anti-vaxx wrecking crew being in the government. It’s horrifying that even one child should die over these lies. But it will very likely be many more than that.
In another life when I worked at big companies full of huge egos (the entertainment business) I often observed that people who are famously successful at one thing believe they are geniuses who are experts at everything. When they start meddling in things they really don’t understand they almost always screw it up.
Let’s just say there are very few Leonardo DaVincis around these days but many very rich (mostly) men who think they see him looking back at them in the mirror every morning.
If you have time to watch this talk by pollster Cornell Belcher, (assuming you have the stomach for this kind of analysis right now) I urge you to do it. Whether he’s right is beyond my ken, but I found it interesting.
Sure we can improve messaging but Dems missing so much of our electorate in 2024 isn't simply about a different message – strategically we must always be about expanding our electorate pic.twitter.com/hzFkh6tL3m
David Neiwert, an expert on white identity movements, takes a stab at why that might have happened:
@davidneiwert.bsky.social: It’s one of the more popular lines of self-flagellation Democratic Party critics and strategists have taken in the wake of the disastrous 2024 election: Harris and her “identity politics” caused many voters, including minorities, to look elsewhere. 2/15
@davidneiwert.bsky.social: But as Tressie McMillan Cottom already observed, Harris in fact tended to deemphasize the racial aspects of her historic candidacy and worked hard to win over Republican voters—to little avail: 3/15 www.nytimes.com/2024/11/06/o…
@davidneiwert.bsky.social: Nonetheless, the New York Times proclaimed that the results were about how “Identity Politics Loses Its Grip on the Country”—thereby erasing Trump’s obvious and pronounced white identity politics, which were they key to his victory. 4/15 www.nytimes.com/2024/11/02/u…
@davidneiwert.bsky.social: The foundation of Trump’s entire campaign against Harris was racial identity politics. This was abundantly clear at the Republican National Convention, as the Washington Post reported at the time: 5/15 www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202…
@davidneiwert.bsky.social: He kicked it all off shortly after she had secured the Democratic nomination by falsely claiming that she switched back and forth between her Indian and Black heritages for her identity: 6/15
@davidneiwert.bsky.social: Throughout the campaign, Trump’s MAGA cohort kept doubling down on white identity politics. A book emitted by the Claremont Institute built the narrative that white people are the main victims of racial discrimination now. 7/15 www.vox.com/politics/357…
@davidneiwert.bsky.social: Those ideas will reverberate throughout the coming Trump administration: 8/15
@davidneiwert.bsky.social: None of this is new for Donald Trump. He embraced white identity politics early in his 2015-16 campaign, a clear warning “that white consciousness can be a potent force in mass political behavior, and could foreshadow a rising white identity politics in the Age of Trump.” 9/15 shorturl.at/CjIfi
@davidneiwert.bsky.social: Since then, we’ve witnessed how white identity politics has become the core animating feature of Republican politics, and how that is borne out at the ballot box. 10/15 fivethirtyeight.com/features/how…
@davidneiwert.bsky.social: Throughout the past campaign and indeed the preceding four years, we’ve been inundated with claims that Critical Race Theory and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion measures constitute “reverse racism.” And thanks to a right-compliant media, they’ve taken hold. 11/15 www.usatoday.com/story/money/…
@davidneiwert.bsky.social: Over at the Heritage Foundation—home of Trump’s Project 2025 team—they’ve been fulminating that DEI sessions are racially divisive. 12/15 www.heritage.org/civil-rights…
@davidneiwert.bsky.social: Meanwhile, Trump’s minions (including Elon Musk) repeatedly described Harris as a “DEI hire.” 13/15 www.heritage.org/progressivis…
@davidneiwert.bsky.social: All of these “reverse racism” claims have a certain familiar ring to anyone who has studied the American extremist right for any length of time, as we became accustomed to hearing identical claims from the likes of David Duke and his neo-Nazi cohorts since the ‘70s. 14/15 fair.org/home/friendl…
@davidneiwert.bsky.social: Indeed, what we call white identity politics now has gone by another name for most of its existence in American politics: white supremacism. Every aspect fundamentally originates in the racist worldview that ruled the U.S. for much of its early history. 15/15 news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor…
@davidneiwert.bsky.social: That history has been eradicated from our children’s education, doubly so now in the age of the DEI panic. Next: A brief history of white supremacy.
The Brazilian government indicted Jair Bolsonaro this week on charges that he tried to stage a coup to overturn the election in 2022. They are damning.
Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, has moved a step closer to jail after a federal police investigation laid bare what it called a murderous authoritarian plot to explode the country’s democratic system with a military coup that the far-right populist allegedly helped mastermind.
Bolsonaro has repeatedly denied involvement in an attempt to overturn the result of the 2022 presidential election, which he narrowly lost to his leftwing rival Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
But on Tuesday, an 884-page federal police report accused the former army captain of taking a lead role in planning and organizing the conspiracy and trying to persuade the most senior members of the military to join the criminal enterprise.
Several top members of the armed forces allegedly agreed, including the commander of the navy, Adm Almir Garnier Santos, and the army’s ground operations commander Gen Estevam Theophilo.
The police report paints the former defence minister, Gen Walter Braga Netto, as being one of the plot’s main architects, although he has denied a coup was ever discussed. Braga Netto, 67, who was Bolsonaro’s vice-presidential running-mate in the 2022 election, has denied involvement in any coup plot. Garnier Santos and Theophilo have yet to publicly comment on the allegations.
I think it’s plain it’s exactly the kind of thing Trump wanted to do in 2020 and couldn’t because the military wouldn’t cooperate. That’s what stoppee Bolsonaro too.
Police allege Bolsonaro ultimately backed away from the three-year plot after the heads of the army and the air force, Gen Marco Antônio Freire Gomes and Air Lieutenant Brigadier Carlos de Almeida Baptista Júnior, refused to offer their support.
Trump and his henchman Pete Hegseth will make sure that doesn’t happen to him if he decides to use the military for his political needs this time. They’re going to purge the top brass of anyone who isn’t a Trump loyalist. Remember this?
The Trump transition team is considering a draft executive order that establishes a “warrior board” of retired senior military personnel with the power to review three- and four-star officers and to recommend removals of any deemed unfit for leadership.
The existence of the infamous Powell memo (1971) is no secret to most lefty activists or to anyone who has listened to Thom Hartmann for more than 30 minutes. Movement conservatism sprouted in the 1970s in reaction to the social changes and liberalizing legislation of the 1960s. But the pushback was likely planted in the wake of Barry Goldwater’s landslide 1964 loss to Lyndon Johnson. Influential, deep-pocketed Republicans, back when they were also conservatives, knew their ideas were unpopular. They decided they needed a long-term marketing strategy to fulfill their antidemocratic visions for American oligarchy.
Democrats (naively) never answered with marketing of their own. See, our ideas are popular, as self-evident as the Declaration’s ideals. They need no marketing. And here we are, decades later, facing an oligarchy led by a criminal autocrat bent on tearing down the country to its foundations. And the foundations too.
Some of us who have been in this business since the Earth was young (O.G. Original Progressive Bloggers) reflect regularly on what might have been. Perhaps we’ll move from there to what to do now.
The New York Times considers the media ecosystem that once-conservatives, now-reactionaries built. The introduction paints a picture of Democrats’ persistent resistance to selling themselves over the long haul.
Atlanta-based influencer, Zackory Kirk (a.k.a. The Zactivist) boasts over 220,000 followers on Instagram, TikTok and elsewhere in social media, a following he’s built over four years. It’s not a lucrative gig, but in the last nine weeks of the Harris-Walz campaign money flowed (unlocked article):
And since Ms. Harris lost?
“Nothing.”
Pam Spaulding, once of Pam’s House Blend, started a thread on Bluesky on the subject:
Back in the early 2000s, you know, when OG bloggers / citizen journalists were trailblazing, that's when the left could have invested in alt media. Regardless of how popular, influential & necessary we were told our blogs were, there was no investment. So they fell 20 years behind the right. 🤷♀️
Most OG bloggers, briantylercohen.bsky.social, also had to self-fund when invited to go on panels (I was invited in the 1st group of bloggers to go to the WH; took off from my day job, paid my own flight). Same to cover 2008 DNC. Seeds were there for an ecosystem, just not planted or cultivated.
The Obama '08 team really headfaked in that direction I became a D precinct committee person, and member of my county D Party Executive Committee at their request, expecting it to be the start of a Party-building effortBut after they won the marching orders never came
It's such a shame. Like I said, they went back to courting the corporate media and staying on the info teat of well-paid consultant class that could have worked with OG alt media (like we were a threat!). It was just flawed thinking that information streams didn't need to change and broaden.
And then OG bloggers saw the right developing its network. Back during early Netroots Nations, the right held a companion conference (RightOnline?). I was invited to one by a conservative colleague (remember, pre-MAGA), many of them were supported — and later became part of the current ecosystem.
We terrified the Dem establishment, who saw us as a threat to their control. As soon as we got Obama elected, his people (Rahm, mostly) actively defunded the few orgs that did support us, and told donors to stay away or else. By 2010, we were dying. Made it easy for FB to kill us off.
And how did that work out for them now? SMH. 🥴 The whole point is we were _not_ actually a threat, we were a new stream of communication that they didn’t understand & could have partnered with, but spent $ elsewhere. That’s not a way to build infrastructure. The GOP knew how to play the long game.
They were old school chums with the MSM, and felt like they could control that channel. But we were just a bunch of upstart state-U randos with no allegiance to their networks, and who might say anything. Like union leaders, we were scary. Better to cut us out of the loop to protect elite power.
It’s just sad that they are acting like it’s a new revelation about a lack of decentralized ecosystem. The OGs were right there back then, some still active. Hope they have the time and money to catch up now — this time around we have an orange emperor that will try to shut down the MSM.
The Times treats this problem as if it’s never been mentioned:
Now Democrats are facing a reckoning, not just over Ms. Harris’s loss to President-elect Donald J. Trump but also over how the left got so badly outflanked online. The sponsorship spigot that many influencers say was turned on too late is now running dry. And the content creators who embraced Ms. Harris fear falling even farther behind their Republican rivals, one viral TikTok at a time.
Interviews with more than a dozen Democratic content creators reveal a pervasive belief that Republicans have helped incubate a highly organized and well-funded ecosystem of influencers, podcast hosts and other online personalities who successfully amplified and spread pro-Trump content. And the content creators are blaming scattershot and underfunded efforts by Democrats to make an impression in a sphere they said the party as a whole had overlooked for at least a decade.
The framing of this problem always misses a key point: There is no The Democratic Party. Neither does the Republican Party fund this RW media ecosystem. The funding comes from allied RW billionaire-royalists who never bought into “created equal.” They spend freely to advance their antidemocratic vision for restoring feudalism. You know, the natural order.
On the left, deep-pocketed influential donors fund candidates and races, not long-term projects. Most Democrat-allied liberal millionaires/billionaires think like short-term investors while Republican-allied investors know the value of buy-and-hold. The right has backed a gaggle of conservative think tanks since the 1970s and now righty social media influencers. Lefties are on their own. And trying to build progressive infrastructure on their own:
“Conservative influencers have year-round support, and those of us on the left have been left to fend for ourselves and it’s not working,” said Leigh McGowan, who goes by iampoliticsgirl and has more than two million followers across various platforms.
Ms. McGowan is a charter member of a new venture called Chorus that was formed this month by a group of influencers who believe the Democratic apparatus has come up far short with social media. It’s the brainchild ofaprivate company, Good Influence, and its goal is to provide resources and guidance to creators and to also identify and amplify new voices.
“We have an obligation to do it because the Democratic Party has been so slow in adapting to the media environment that we’re in right now,” said Brian Tyler Cohen, another inaugural Chorus member and the host of a popular YouTube channel where he once interviewed President Biden.
Best of luck to them. Really. A few of us oldsters are still out here plugging away as we have for decades: Atrios, Crooks & Liars, Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, Hullabaloo, etc. A few OG Bloggers have paying supplemental gigs. Or a few full-time ones (David Dayen, Bill Scher, Ezra Klein, Josh Marshall). But we’ve never enjoyed the warm embrace either of the Democratic Party elite or lefty billionaires for pushing back against the spread of conspiracy theories, xenophobia and nascent fascism.
We’re thankful to you for sticking with us red-headed stepchildren.
