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.
It may feel as if half the U.S. has been hit with a Cordyceps brain infection that mindlessly seeks to spread submission to autocracy. But take heart. Pockets of resistance remain.
In the former Soviet republic of Georgia, for instance (BBC):
Riot police in Georgia used pepper spray and water cannon against protesters who turned out on the streets of Tbilisi after the government suspended moves to join the European Union.
Forty-three people were arrested at the demonstrations in the capital on Thursday night, the government said.
Crowds turned out after Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze said his government would drop its pursuit of EU membership “until the end of 2028” – a move criticised by more than 100 diplomats on Friday as “unconstitutional”.
Kobakhidze had accused the bloc of “blackmail” after EU legislators called for last month’s parliamentary elections in Georgia to be re-run. They cited “significant irregularities”.
Protests against the rise of pro-Russian politician Calin Georgescu spread beyond Bucharest to other Romanian cities on November 26 after his surprise victory in the first round of a presidential election over the weekend.
Protests opposing Georgescu took place on the evening of November 26 in Bucharest, Timisoara, Iasi, Brasov, and Sibiu.
Georgescu faces a runoff against pro-Western center-right candidate Elena Lasconi on December 8 after winning 22.94 percent of the vote in the first round of balloting on November 24 in the EU and NATO member state.
About 1,000 people turned out in Bucharest for the second night of protests against Georgescu in the Romanian capital’s University Square.
Most of those who took to the streets were young people who expressed their concern about Georgescu’s radical attitudes and the future of their country.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty describes its mission:
RFE/RL’s mission is to promote democratic values by providing accurate, uncensored news and open debate in countries where a free press is threatened and disinformation is pervasive. RFE/RL reports the facts, undaunted by pressure.
What a great idea! Know of any other countries that could use one of those?
Meanwhile, all’s quiet on the American front. Have you seen some of those Black Friday deals?
An animal shelter in North Carolina served a Thanksgiving dinner for all of their dogs and cats. (sheltermommy : tiktok/Kristi Plyant FB) pic.twitter.com/dhEWyZsXgj
I don’t know why he does this gross thing on every holiday but I do know that it’s now considered normal for the leader of the United States to act like an absolute ass in public all the time. I guess that’s what half the voters wanted.
And then there’s this:
This is a real tweet from vice president-elect JD Vance depicting himself as Trump’s wife.
Many of you have probably already heard this story. It’s apparently a huge viral social media sensation that’s been out there for 8 years. I had never heard it. (Where have I been?)
Wanda Dench, aka “Thanksgiving Grandma,” and her unlikely friend, Jamal Hinton, have simple words of advice for Americans this year — Spend the holiday with family.
The Arizona residents have shared Thanksgiving together every year since a Nov. 2016 text meant for Dench’s grandson was instead received by a then 17-year-old Hinton.
Their friendship has become as much a staple of the holiday as cranberry sauce and football, and their life journeys have in some ways become emblematic of the country’s course. The 67-year-old Dench lost her husband early in the pandemic and is now in between cancer treatments.
“You really never know when (will be) the last time you have a dinner with someone, or be able to talk to someone,” Hinton said in an interview with The Arizona Republic while recalling a recent conversation with Dench. “I’d always suggest seeing your loved ones.”
Their serendipitous encounter, enshrined in a viral post Hinton dropped on Twitter, now X, has since become part of national lore. Hinton told Dench the number she reached was no longer her grandson’s but his. She dutifully obliged his cheeky request for a dinner plate and invited him over for Thanksgiving dinner with her family.
Talking with The Republic, Dench found herself counting what Thanksgiving they were on, her voice lifting in surprise as she said, “Oh, ninth year.”
Hinton and Dench have theorized their initial Thanksgiving meetup served as a balm on a country reeling from a divisive election. The subsequent distress from the 2016 election still troubles Dench.
“Boy, did I see and hear so many stories of families so divided over it, which is so sad to me,” Dench said.
It’s a nice story. I hope all of you are having a nice Thanksgiving as well.
I needed to see this;—maybe you do too. 💙
Everyone needs a friend like this in their lives. An update on the grandma who accidentally invited a teen to Thanksgiving dinner celebrates eight years of a beautiful friendship.
