Presidential Veepstakes!

Yesterday I watched as one of the hosts on MSNBC reassured her audience over and over again that the choice of a vice-presidential running mate doesn’t matter. I was a little dismayed at how she kept hammering home the point, especially when it seems clear that she is completely wrong. Earlier in the nation’s history, this was certainly true. In fact, Franklin D. Roosevelt went through several vice presidents during his four elections before Harry Truman just happened to be in the office when the president died. John F. Kennedy was keenly aware that he needed not just a southern Democrat on the ticket, but one who had a lot of charisma and political power. But I would argue that ever since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, that the vice-presidential pick has been instrumental in the election or defeat of presidential hopefuls. Certainly not the sole factor, but decidedly in the top two or three. This is a belief I have held for many years now, based on historical precedent, and one that has led to an adage that a presidential hopeful has the best chance of winning when they “pick from the podium.” That is, when choosing from among the strongest contenders in the presidential primaries, a nominee is not only adding their rival’s followers to his or her own, but unifying the party after what are usually contentious contests for the nomination. Presidential hopefuls who have failed to do this, usually lose.

In 1980 Ronald Reagan stunned most political pundits by selecting George H.W. Bush as his running mate, because Bush had been one of Reagan’s harshest critics on the debate stage during the Republican primaries. It was the first real choice of this kind in U.S. history, but it set the tone for future presidential success. Typically, the opposing party is able to use attacks against the eventual nominee of the opposing party by adopting those made in the primaries. But this sort of neutralizes those attacks and, even more crucially, can unify the party AS a party, rather than around a personality. Reagan was going to win against Carter regardless, but he had an even easier time four years later when Walter Mondale chose Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate in 1984. She was a brilliant choice, but a disaster in terms of being the first woman on a presidential ticket. It wasn’t the only reason Mondale lost, as he was essentially Carter lite, but it hurt his even minimal chances further, resulting in the most lopsided landslide in U.S. presidential history, losing 525 to 13 in the electoral college. George H.W. Bush, unlike his predecessor, made a colossal blunder in choosing Dan Quayle, an absolute dolt who couldn’t spell the word “potato.” The only reason Bush won, however, is because Michael Dukakis was such a poor candidate on the Democratic side that even the excellent selection of Lloyd Bentson couldn’t resuscitate his doomed campaign.

Four years later, after the country was much more familiar with just how dumb Dan Quayle was, he became more of an albatross. Bush lost the 1988 election primarily due to third-party candidate Ross Perot, who siphoned off far more Republican votes than he did Democratic ones for Bill Clinton. But make no mistake, in a solid second place for why he was defeated, was his vice-presidential train wreck. The reason Clinton skated by with the uninspired Al Gore, was because not only was Quayle a drag on the Republican ticket, but Ross Perot made easily the worst vice-presidential selection in U.S. history with Admiral James Stockdale. To paraphrase a podcaster on the disastrous Republican response to Biden’s most recent State of the Union address by the wacked-out Katie Britt, “You do not want to be the cold open on Saturday Night Live. If you are, then you’ve done something terribly wrong.” James Stockdale was that in spades. No one who remembers that year can forget Phil Hartman’s brutal portrayal of Stockdale as a demented senior citizen who had no idea where he was or what he was doing. And so next to those two, the super-stiff and stilted Gore looked positively charismatic. Fortunately for Clinton, Gore was also no dummy, and so while he didn’t necessarily add anything to the ticket, he didn’t drag it down, either. Bob Dole, in the 1996 campaign, did the wise thing by choosing Jack Kemp, who had run against him in the primaries, but Dole, like Dukakis before him, was an inherently weak candidate and his selection of Kemp was unable to compensate for his deficiencies.

All of which brings us to the 2000 presidential campaign. I can remember exactly where I was when I knew Al Gore was going to lose the race. I was riding in a car from Wyoming to the Denver airport, and on NPR they made the announcement that Gore had selected Joe Lieberman as his running mate. George W. Bush had Darth Vader as his potential vice-president, and so Gore decided to go with . . . Droopy Dog? It wasn’t James Stockdale, but it was in the same zip code. Almost precisely like Mondale’s selection of Ferraro: the reason why it was done was clear, but attempts to be progressive before their time are doomed to failure. And still, Gore nearly won, which emphasizes even further that it was his vice-presidential pick that actually lost him the election. Lieberman wasn’t even a Democrat, he was an Independent. And with Ralph Nader siphoning off Democratic votes in the same way Perot did to the first Bush, the VP choice was even more crucial. Gore made the wrong choice, and it cost him the presidency. Bush won again in 2004 because of his unjustified war in Iraq, but even with that John Kerry’s choice of John Edwards wasn’t exactly inspired. Sure, he was young and energetic and from the south, but with his white-guy nineteen-seventies haircut, he always seemed kind of smarmy. And sure enough, it eventually came out that he had cheated on his wife and took campaign money for personal use during the affair. At the time, it did not seem surprising, and I think voters could sense it.

2008, however, is the real shining example of this argument in action, two choices that went in completely opposite directions. First, Barak Obama. During a hard-fought campaign Obama began really challenging Hillary Clinton for the nomination. Joe Biden, who also ran, was an early casualty, dropping out after his loss in Iowa. At the end of the day Obama had won the nomination, and his selection of a VP was genius. The big knock against him at the time was that he had no foreign policy experience. But Joe Bided did, as a longtime member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. None of this long outmoded “southern strategy” like the Edwards pick for Kerry. Obama didn’t need the crucial Delaware vote. Biden was serious, engaging, intelligent, and the most knowledgeable Senator on foreign policy. His selection made sense not only in terms of his ethnicity, but also Biden’s ability to strengthen the overall ticket through his age and experience. John McCain, on the other hand? Well . . . he decided to go in a different direction. McCain obviously couldn’t pick another white guy and seriously challenge Obama. Picking a black man was too on the nose, so that meant going with a woman. It had been nearly thirty years since Geraldine Ferraro, so his people plucked from obscurity a completely unknown governor from Alaska—apparently with no vetting whatsoever—and forced McCain to take her. John McCain never liked Sara Palin, for obvious reasons. She was equal parts ignorant, inexperienced, and insincere, and wound up being a perfect storm of political poison that led to a landslide defeat.

Mitt Romney did little better with his vice-presidential selection four years later. In 2012 he failed to pick from the podium, as had McCain, and fatally selected Congressman Paul Ryan. There was a reason that McCain hadn’t gone with another white guy, because even the Republican voters had moved in a more progressive direction by this point, and his retro-selection just seemed to be more of the same white-guy hubris. It wasn’t as bad a blowout as 2008, but Barak and Biden cruised easily to another four years in the White House. In a fair world, Biden would have picked up the mantle and used his vice-presidential experience to crush failed businessman and would-be fascist Donald Trump in 2016, but when his son Beau died of cancer Biden chose not to run. This series of events finally elevated Hillary Clinton to the Democratic nomination, after a tough-fought campaign against Bernie Sanders. There were several factors that led to Clinton’s loss, the first being her seemingly tone-deaf responses to the Black Lives Matter movement, the lead in the drinking water in Michigan, and working people in general. The second was Bernie Sanders’ petulant attitude after his loss, which suggested to his supporters that they NOT vote for Clinton in the general election. But what finally clinched her loss to Trump was her VP selection.

A young black male politician would have been the perfect choice, unfortunately there were none who had run for the Democratic nomination, just old white guys and Hillary. Certainly, Bernie was the obvious choice, as he was hugely popular, but even had she asked him—and she might have—there is no way he would have accepted. So, with the selection process wide open, who did she pick? Tim Kaine. I had the same reaction I had to Gore’s Lieberman pick. I knew she had lost as soon as it was announced. Kaine was an utterly boring, entirely uninteresting senator from Virginia. He brought absolutely nothing to the table, but worse than that, he was a complete drag on the ticket. The guy was ten years younger than Clinton, but onscreen and in interviews he looked ten years older. This was the equally idiotic VP wisdom that says the pick needs to be someone who doesn’t outshine the candidate, after all, it had worked for her husband. But Al Gore was neutral overall, while Kaine was a decided negative. Ultimately Clinton lost by a tiny number of votes in battleground states, and yet still won the popular vote by nearly three million votes. It’s not unrealistic to suggest that, even with the primary reasons for her defeat, she might have pulled off a victory had she chosen much more dynamic running mate, rather than losing to yet another Republican white-guy duo.

Having learned from Hillary’s mistake, when Biden came out of retirement to run in 2020 after a disastrous Trump administration—in which the failed president killed a million of his citizens, emboldened foreign dictatorships, and tanked the economy—he announced up front that he was going to choose a woman as a running mate—end of discussion. And did he ever. Not only was Kamala Harris an outstanding intellect, a former prosecutor, state attorney general, and Senator, but she was a pick from the podium! Who can forget Biden telling her in an aside at the second debate, with a wink and a smile, “Take it easy on me, kid.” The choice harkened back to Reagan in 1980. Not only was Harris in the race with Biden, she was one of his toughest critics. The selection in one stroke added diversity to the ticket, signaled a genuine progressive achievement in the form of the first female vice-president, and unified the party. Up against THAT, the two white-guys ticket on the other side didn’t have a chance. It also didn’t hurt that the entire world, not just the U.S. hated Trump. Bells rang out all over the countries of the world when the citizens of the United States decided to dump Trump.

It’s difficult to believe that Trump could have made an even worse choice for vice-president than Mike Pence, a lapdog who followed his leader around and could only look up after taking his nose out of Trump’s ass. But Pence wasn’t going to break the law, which infuriated the failed president, and led to his disastrous—though good for the rest of us—pick in the 2024 race, J.D. (Shady) Vance. Trump finally has a lackey with no personality, who’s as dumb as he is, and who will certainly do anything—including breaking the law—that Trump asks him. Based on this pick alone, Trump should lose. By far his best choice would have been Nikki Haley, but Trump is far too stupid to do something smart, and she is far too smart to do something that stupid. So the only variable at the moment is who Kamala Harris’s choice will be. Wisely, Gretchen Whitmer has taken herself out of the running, as two women are unlikely to overcome still rampant sexism on the right and in the middle. For the same reason Pete Buttigieg is not a good choice. Though he is one of the party’s best and brightest communicators, this pick at this time would be on the order of Ferraro or Lieberman. Andy Beshear lacks the necessary charisma, and having two blacks on the ticket eliminates Cedric Richmond. Tim Walz, Roy Cooper and J.B. Pritzker are also poor choices simply because of the optics: they look old, and set the wrong tone for Harris’s campaign. Tim Kaine all over again.

That leaves just two solid choices, Mark Kelly of Arizona, and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania. Shapiro is a young and experienced governor and seems a very commanding presence that could aid Harris tremendously on the campaign trail—not to mention delivering the incredibly important swing state of Pennsylvania. And he also sounds just like Obama! Kelly is an equally good choice for different reasons, a veteran, an astronaut, and a strong personality himself, he has the gravitas of an older presence on the ticket, much as Biden did for Obama, and he is poised to deliver a swing state as well. My choice, if it were up to me, actually would be Beto O’Rourke. I don’t know anyone who is a more passionate advocate for gun control, and would be solid on domestic issues while Kamala further refines her foreign policy credentials. Unfortunately, he has taken on the cast of a loser recently in his unsuccessful bid to become governor of Texas. Between Shapiro and Kelley, I would probably go with Shapiro, simply because he’s younger and can deliver many more electoral votes. With either him or Kelly, it puts the vice-president on a solid path to victory. Choosing someone other than those two, however, makes the prospect a lot more difficult than it should be in an already critical time for the country. It’s not certain that her early momentum will carry Kamala all the way to election day, so her choice now is every bit as important as the one we will make in November.

Ridin' with Biden!

Couple of things first off about the idiotic notion that President Biden needs to step down. Number 1: George Clooney—Shut . . . the Hell . . . UP! Nobody gives a rat’s ass what you think about Biden and the presidential race. You want to have an opinion? Run for the House or the Senate first and win a seat, THEN you get to have a voice in Democratic politics. But not until then. I don’t know what the hell you think you’re trying to accomplish, but you you’re not helping. And the same goes for Congressional Democrats—Shut . . . the Hell . . . UP! It’s one thing for a “movie star” who doesn’t know any better to shoot his mouth off, but you people have no excuse. It honestly makes it seem as if you’re in the pay of the Republican party, that’s how incredibly stupid it is to have you wringing your hands and clutching your pearls and acting like we’ve already lost. Because if you’re not at least getting paid to undermine President Biden, then you really are as idiotic as you look.

Number 2: The President’s staff, on the other hand—THAT’S who ought to step down. The utterly moronic “preparation” they did for the debate was criminally negligent. Biden should have stayed on European time when he returned from Italy, been awakened at five in the evening on the night of the debate, had a light breakfast, and then kicked Trump’s ass. Which he did anyway! I’m with Gavin Newsom on this: on substance, it was no contest. Trump lied the entire debate. Every word out of his mouth was completely unsubstantiated by anything remotely resembling a fact or evidence—and that was just on the few occasions when he wasn’t lying. Everything else was lies! THAT’s the narrative. And why Biden’s staff didn’t prepare him for that going in, was no less than a dereliction of duty. I wrote about this before, after the debate, so I won’t rehash it here, but suffice to say, there was no reason in the world to have Biden directly respond to anything that Trump said. They guy’s a brainless tool. What do you gain from arguing with that?

But to the matter at hand. Professor Allan Lichtman has correctly called every single presidential election since 1984 with his Keys to the White House. (And this idea that he didn’t get it right in 2000 is complete BS. He called it absolutely right in a presidential election that actually WAS stolen). He has correctly predicted that Biden will win in November, though it doesn’t take a college professor to see that Trump’s toxic policies and criminal behavior are an even bigger incentive for an informed electorate than in 2020. More importantly, Lichtman called the correct outcome in 2016 when all of the polls said that Hillary was going to win. And that’s what’s so infuriating, to have stooges like George Stephanopoulos spout polling to the President as if that closes the case. Even Thursday night, after Biden’s press conference, Nichole Wallace was parroting the same polling data to say that Biden is “behind” in the race. Seriously? The polling has been WRONG every two years since 2016! Where the hell does this sudden trust in the polls come from? I’ll tell you about a poll. Thursday, prior to the press conference, Brian Tyler Cohen, took a poll of some 25,000 of his viewers who watched along with him, and they were 60-40 for Biden going in. After the press conference, he asked those who watched the whole event to take the poll again, and this time, among what can only be assumed to be Democratic-leaning viewers, the numbers shot up to 75-25 for Biden. And why not? He’s the freakin’ President. Incumbency is a HUGE factor in a presidential race, and something those calling for Biden to step down just want to throw away—and more importantly, something no other Democrat has. Which also says a lot about how bad Trump is, that he was crushed in 2020 even with it.

And that’s another thing. Have all of you forgotten 2020? Because I haven’t. Most telling to me was the ringing of church bells ALL OVER EUROPE when Trump lost. When has that ever happened in American history? “Ding-dong the wicked witch is dead.” How badly did the rest of the world hate Trump that they would have responded like that? And there were plenty of celebrations in the streets of this country as well after we had finally overcome our petulant idiocy in letting Hillary Clinton’s personality cause us to hand the White House to a fascist dolt. You remember him, don’t you? A guy who did absolutely nothing as president, other than play golf, break the law, and give tax cuts to the wealthy, a guy who sat on his ass for hours watching on TV the mob that HE unleashed on the Capitol as they tried to subvert the will of the voters. Yeah, THAT’S who Biden’s running against this time, too. Or what about the supreme court, packed with right-wing lawbreakers themselves, giving Trump whatever he wants, keeping him out of jail, and taking away our rights and freedoms? Have you forgotten that already? And what happens when you let what happened in 2016 happen again, getting so whiny and childish about our candidate that you inadvertently give not only the White House this time, but the entire government, to the inspiration for Project 2025. Because I’m telling you, if you do it again, it’s the last presidential vote you’ll ever cast.

Joe Biden is old. Got it. He mixes up names, he forgets things. He also has a speech impediment, lest we forget, that is more difficult to control as he gets older. Got that too. And . . . ? Because of that you want to let a guy who’s going to end democracy . . . end democracy? You’re just going to LET that happen because you were embarrassed by a senior citizen’s debate performance? That’s what you want? That’s worth it to you? Joe Biden has arguably done more for the people of this country than any president since Roosevelt. He learned the lessons of Obama’s ineffective last six years, rammed home some significant legislation while he could in his first two years, and passed more bi-partisan legislation with a completely obstructionist Congress after that. Biden is poised to be even more effective with a Democratic Congress in his second term. It’s because of all that that our President has collected 3,896 delegates during the primaries. He needs only 1,968 to secure the nomination at the Democratic Convention. And yet, Biden has already essentially released the delegates to vote with their conscience, so what the hell else do you want? The hard fact is, even having done that, he can lose almost half of the delegates and still win the nomination. As soft as some Congressional Democrats and others are about Biden, he has a terrific amount of support among the American people—as well he should! And like it or not, he’s going to be the nominee.

One thing more to consider. This election isn’t just about the election. There’s the supreme court to think about, and what they are going do when Trump inevitably sues in order to claim that he really won . . . again. If you thought the last transition was a rough one, that was nothing compared to what’s in store this coming winter. Trump and his criminal minions are not going to make the same mistakes they made last time, when they were throwing it all together at the last minute. They’ve already planned how they’re going to refuse to certify the election results; they’re going to disrupt state election boards; they’re going to successfully block the counting of the electoral votes. They’re going to do everything possible to push the decision to the supreme court where the presidency will be handed to Trump on a silver platter—and that’s if Democrats win! Hard decisions are going to have to be made, like packing the court. Literally, the only way to save our democracy is if Biden, as soon as possible after the election is called, is able to nominate and confirm four new supreme court judges before the court can hand the White House to Trump. And if you think that’s something Biden’s going to be reluctant to do, just imagine a different Democratic president in their first term. That person is not going to want to begin their presidency—always assuming they’ll be able to hold on to it by the end of January—with the lame duck president packing the court. All of this makes much more sense for Biden to do himself. And at the end of the day he can always step down later, and single handedly go down in the history books as responsible for the first female President of the United States. Not a bad way to go out.

So it’s time to snap out of it, people. It’s time to move forward from the “debate.” We have a guy running on our ticket who has the most experience of anyone who has ever run for president in the entire history of our nation. And he’s 81. FYI, that’s where the aforementioned experience comes from. So get over it! Corporate media shills in the news have been making a big deal of this for weeks, but that’s what they get paid to do. Why give them more ammunition? The real narrative of this election isn’t about Joe Biden’s age, it’s about the fact that Trump and his Republican Maggots want to end democracy. THAT’S what we need to be focusing on, from now until election day. And I would sure as hell hope that’s a little more important than the fact the President had a poor performance in a debate because he stayed up way past his bedtime. Tools like George Stephanopoulos get paid by their corporate employers to generate controversy where none really exists. Why take the bait? Stop talking about Biden and make the case against Trump. Our guy already beat him by eight million votes before, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was closer to ten million this time. During his incredibly disingenuous interview with ABC, Stephanopoulos asked the President how he would feel if he stayed in the race and lost. But that’s not the question. The real question is how are all of YOU going to feel if Biden drops out and we lose. Because there’s no going back this time. I just hope the Congressional Democrats and the rest of the whiners like Clooney can pull their heads out of their asses before it’s too late. But regardless, I’m still ridin’ with Biden!

Welcome to the Fascist States of America!

Well, it looks as if they’ve finally done it. Ever since the end of the Civil War, corporate interests in this country have been trying to take it over, to form a capitalist state with no regulations, no taxes (on the wealthy, that is), and no accountability to anyone. The movement hit a major snag when the Great Depression exposed the myth of capitalism for all to see, and the people were having none of it. But by the time the war had exhausted everyone the right-wing began sharpening their knives once again and started waging a covert war on democracy. It was subtle at first, and seemingly went unchecked for the next seventy years. So by the time the stupidest many in history took over the White House and exposed yet again what was happening, it was too late. And let me be perfectly clear, this is not about politics. Politics is theater, a distraction, misdirection at a magic show, to capture the attention of the audience so that they don’t see what is really happening. What we are experiencing at this moment is the complete and total corporate takeover of the United States. The democratic experiment is apparently nearing the end as a corporate oligarchy is poised to completely take control and consign the rest of us to third-class citizenship, whose only function is to make more money for the wealthy elites while they keep us in bondage to a life of servitude as wage slaves—INCLUDING THOSE WHO VOTED TO GIVE THEM THE POWER!

For all the historians out there, professional and amateur alike, who ever wondered what it was like in Germany in the early 1930s as the Nazis were taking over, well . . . now you know. Just like the people in Germany who wanted to vent their anger at someone or something—to whom Hitler offered them the Jews, and to reward him they made him dictator—we now have the Fascist States of America in which corporate-controlled politicians and judges have paved the way for the next Republican president to become a dictator and punish the brainwashed idiots who voted him into office by allowing him to take away all of their rights and freedoms—just like he’s going to do to everyone else. And to those Maggot cult members who still believe that they are going to escape the retribution that has been promised to “others,” they are in for a rude awakening once their corporate masters don’t need their “votes” anymore. They’re going to be right down in the pits of hell with the rest of us. Make no mistake. The only people the corporate oligarchy hates worse than liberals are the gun-toting, bible-thumping, beer-guzzling, trailer trash they’ve had to pander to for the last seventy years. Of course, THEY won’t need to do it directly to the fascist faithful. They only need to ply their brainless cult members with enough guns and indignation that they will do it to themselves.

The reality for most of us after the most recent supreme court decision (yes, purposely without capitals) is that we’ve probably cast our final democratic votes in the United States of America. Even if Biden wins legitimately, there is absolutely nothing stopping Republicans from taking the case to the supreme court to have them overturn the decision of the electorate. That’s always assuming that they haven’t already corrupted enough state election boards to make the exercise unnecessary. Honestly, there’s really only one way out of all this mess. That’s right, just one. Unfortunately, it would require that someone—perhaps many people—sit President Biden down after the election—no matter how it turns out—and acquaint him with the facts of life in our nascent fascist society. The political landscape in the country that Joe Biden once knew is gone—vanished. And someone needs to hammer that home to him—and don’t stop until he gets it. The old rules don’t apply anymore. The right-wing oligarchy is poised to take control, and simply handing over the reins to them in January because it is the “right thing to do” is not only NOT the right thing to do, it would be morally irresponsible and reprehensible, tantamount to treason and a complete abdication of the oath he took to protect and defend the Constitution. Biden has already signaled in his most recent White House remarks that he will not abuse the office of the president. That’s fine; no one is asking him to. What we will be asking, however—demanding, even—is for him to save democracy, no matter what the cost.

At the beginning of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was faced with a similar decision. The Southern states had seceded, but there were still sympathetic Southern judges on the Supreme Court who were poised to undo all that Lincoln was going to need to accomplish to see the war to a victorious end. And in that regard he had only one choice. What’s so tremendously impressive is that he did it, with no qualms and no handwringing. To save the Republic he had to pack the Supreme Court, and that’s exactly what he did. By expanding the court he obviated the need to remove justices by making Southern sympathizers a minority and rendering their views superfluous. This MUST happen after the election, or not only will Joe Biden not go down as a great president, he will forever be infamous as the man who ended democracy in America by handing over the government to the fascist, corporate oligarchy. It really is that cut and dried. Just winning the election will not be enough—not nearly enough. The very supreme court he needs to save, has already given him immunity powers that are unprecedented. He MUST use them! Since the court has essentially rendered Congress powerless, they can do nothing, deadlocked as they are. But the slim majority in the Senate enables Biden to put judges on the bench and get them confirmed without the House’s approval.

Honestly, there’s no other way. There just isn’t. If Biden doesn’t pack the court as soon as the election is over, the presidency will be taken away from him, one way or another, and in that moment democracy will have been taken away from all of us. This isn’t abuse of power. It’s giving back to the people what the right-wing oligarchs have already taken away from us through their employees on the supreme court. And somebody needs to make him see that! Will the Maggots on the right lose their shit when it happens? Absolutely. But none of that matters anymore. It really doesn’t. What Biden would be doing, he would be doing to save the Republic. Period. If that means calling out the National Guard to quell the right-wing riots, then so be it. If that means activating the military to make sure people are safe from the fanatics who have been so idiotic as to vote away their own freedoms, then that is a step worth taking. It’s gonna get ugly, people, one way or another. So wouldn’t it be better to get ugly in the pursuit of saving democracy rather than losing it?

No matter what happens in November, the bought-and-paid-for right-wing justices of the supreme court are going to remove Joe Biden from office, unless he rights the ship of state first by adding four more justices to the court. In the past Biden has dismissed the idea out of hand because of what the consequences would be down the road for right-wing abuse. Well, we’re way beyond that now. There’s no more road ahead. We are out of runway. This is the most existential threat this country has ever faced, without precedent. Joe Biden will be in power until the end of January. He needs to use that power to save this country. THAT must be his legacy. If he doesn’t, everything he has done in his entire forty-seven years of public service will be seen as nothing more than fiddling while Rome burns. The majority of people in this country—that’s right, the MAJORITY—do not want fascist rule. The people are on his side, and we need him to do what he was elected for. The days of reaching across the aisle are over. There needs to be one-party rule, sure, but that party needs to be the majority of the people in the United States, not the wealthy minority and their brain-dead zombie voters. Joe Biden is the only one who can save the country now. He is all that is standing between us and dictatorship. If he doesn’t pack the supreme court in November, then nothing else is going to matter. But I just don’t know if Biden has the fortitude. At this point, my optimism is gone.

The First Presidential Debacle

Last night was unfortunate, primarily because it was so completely unnecessary. The one hard fact about the choice for president this year is that there is no choice. On one side is the stupidest man to ever enter politics in U.S. history—and that’s saying something—an abject moron who couldn’t find his own monumental ass with two hands and a flashlight, a convicted criminal and con-man, a congenital defect of a human being, a compulsive liar, a deluded narcissist, and an amoral mass murderer: he told the citizens of this country to ignore Covid and therefore is directly responsible for killing over a million of them. On the other side is a man who has given his entire adult life to the service of the people: thirty-six years as a senator, eight years as vice-president, and a three-year stint as president that has helped the country to recover from the unmitigated disaster that was the previous administration. It’s not a choice, any more than it was in 2020. Biden’s four years older now, and it showed. But does that change the metric? Not one bit. And it’s important to remember that Trump’s changed, too. Not only has he been indicted for inciting an insurrection on January 6th, and for stealing classified documents and obstructing justice, but also twice for election interference. He was ultimately convicted of thirty-four counts of the latter in New York, though he’s unarguably guilty of all of it. The contrast, in fact, is even starker than it was four years ago.

What’s so disappointing about last night, however, is that it should never have come to pass. And most of the blame for that belongs to Biden’s team. They let him down—bigly. There was absolutely no reason whatsoever for Biden to get on stage with Tdump. None. Because there was absolutely nothing to gain. But even after deciding to go ahead with it, Biden’s team did him a real disservice. This was not a debate. And more importantly, it was never going to be. Why anyone on Biden’s team thought he should engage with Lie-GPT in any way, is political negligence. The ONLY things Biden should have been focused on last night were two specific tasks. One, getting his message across to the American people on whatever topics he was asked about. And two, calling out the idiot on the other side for the liar he is. That’s it. Biden should not have responded to the moron in any way, shape, or form. When asked a question Biden needed to tell the people what he has done and why he is the only choice, as well as why tRump is a liar and wants to destroy the country. Every answer needed to be a canned response, to the people, that made absolutely no direct reference to anything the convicted felon had to say in the moment. In fact, Biden should never even have looked at him the entire night.

Everyone knew what the seditionist-in-chief was going to do last night. Everyone, it seems, except Biden’s team. What the hell were they thinking? The former White House dunce uses words like good and bad, great and terrible, best and worst—which mean absolutely NOTHING when it comes to governance, and even less when they come out of Tdump’s mouth. He uses NO statistics, NO numbers, NO facts, and NO evidence in any of what could only be euphemistically called “arguments.” And that’s because there are none that even remotely back up his assertions. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING is either and ad hominem attack on the other side, or a brag about himself. And they’re ALL LIES. He projects one hundred percent of the time, so every attack on the left is something he has already done, and every boast is something the left has done and the right has absolutely no intention of ever doing. Which means there’s absolutely no way to “debate” someone like that. Every time tRump’s lips moved last night, he lied. Lies are not arguments. So if the second debate ever comes off, his team needs to drum that into Biden’s brain. BE presidential—because you ARE the president—by not engaging him. Get your message across and ignore the addle-brained ranting of Fat Man and Little Hands.

The facts are beyond dispute. Trump wants to end democracy, to end civil rights, and end any corporate responsibility to the workers they employ. But all of that is just to placate his worshipers, his deluded followers who don’t realize he has every intention of punishing them right along with the rest of the country. The ONE THING Trump wants is to use the White House, once again, to enrich himself. That’s it. Full stop. Because he’s broke, the worst businessman in U.S. history, the only way he can stay afloat is to use the office of the president as a base of criminal operations to extort as much money as he can from whoever he can. Rich or poor, it doesn’t matter to him. He’ll first use the office to rid himself of all legal cases against him, then open for business by allowing the worst right-wing radicals to gut this country of every right the Constitution affords—if not the Constitution itself—as long as he gets a cut of the action. Fox “News” won’t have to lie about Biden’s performance last night. He came off as a tired, confused, doddering old man. But does that make him a worse choice than Trump? Are you kidding? Right now Jimmy Carter is a better choice than Trump. And Fox is going to have to lie its propagandistic ass off when it comes to their candidate, backing up and repeating his litany of untruths.

So, is this the end? Are we doomed? I don’t think so. Idiotic ideas like having Biden drop out of the race, however, don’t help things. That would be a suicide move by the Democrats, as it would assure a Trump victory. Even with someone like Gavin Newsom—as tempting as that would be—the optics would be so bad we would probably lose all of the swing states. And that’s not even factoring in what to do about Kamala. How do you ignore her? Right now, the Republicans are losing in every important metric in the campaign, despite the poll numbers. Abortion and civil rights top the list, but the economy and inflation are close on their heels, and the Republicans suck at making the case for their pro-wealthy, anti-democratic agenda. So it’s not time to panic. There are still over four months to go, a Democratic convention and perhaps another “debate,” that might be able to turn around the perception—which is all that needs to happen, because the reality is on our side. Unfortunately, voters on the right are living in an alternate reality in which they are being urged to vote for their own destruction, and seem perfectly willing to do it, taking the rest of us off the cliff with them. So it’s incumbent upon the rest of us to remember that presidential elections are NOT about the candidates. They are about ideology. Whether or not you “like” Biden is immaterial. In fact, it’s destructive thinking. Basing your vote on personality is what the other side is doing—and look how that turned out. If we want to keep our democracy, if we ever want to vote again, we MUST vote against the Maggot, whether Joe seems up for it or not. Because, in the end, it may be the last presidential choice you get to make.

Corporate News Networks

I used to watch the online commentary of former CNN journalist Chris Cillizza on occasion, which was called The Point, though I rarely do anymore because he's a complete tool—which is probably why CNN let him go. But after watching him this week he made an error of omission so glaring that I had no choice but to respond. In his most recent video, called “The simple reason why Nikki Haley is voting for Donald Trump,” Cillizza comes to this conclusion: “She is ultimately a political realist, in a Trump-controlled party.” No, no, no, no, no!!! That is NOT why she has endorsed the worst president in the history of the United States, a five-year-old masquerading as an adult, a crybaby criminal who makes Richard Nixon look like a candidate for Mount Rushmore. Unfortunately, Cillizza’s greatest disability in attempting to provide an answer to this question for his viewers is that he doesn’t actually know what the answer is. In explaining his rationale he goes on to say,

          There’s this myth that I think the media like to sort of present, that there’s still sort of two wings of
          the Republican party. There’s the Trump wing, and there’s the kind of establishment wing, for lack
          of a better word. There aren’t two wings of the Republican party, there’s just the one wing, the
          Trump wing, the Trump party. There are some people . . . who criticize Trump, and say maybe this
          isn’t the best direction for the party. But those people have no power. All of the power, all of the power,
          is consolidated in the Trump wing of the party. Donald Trump is the king of the party.

Where to begin? First of all, Trump does not have any power, any more than Hitler did in Germany in 1930. What he does have, like Hitler, is a voting block loyal to his hatred that he can wield either against his enemies or alongside his allies. That is why no one I’ve ever heard speak about Trump and his followers has never been able to adequately explain what is going on with them. But the reason is fairly simple. In a word: hate. Trump hates who they hate. He hates immigrants, he hates blacks, he hates Hispanics, he hates women, he hates gays, lesbians, trans people and the rest of the alphabet, he hates liberals, he hates intellectuals, and because he hates the same people they do, they don’t care about the rest. Stealing classified documents, shopping them around to our enemies, weaponizing the Department of Justice, giving tax cuts to the wealthy, trying to rig a presidential election then trying to steal it afterward when he lost, inciting an insurrection? They don’t care about any of it . . . because he hates the same people they hate. Trump’s followers want only one thing from him, the very same thing the antisemitic voters in Germany wanted from Hitler: for him to punish other people, and punish them hard for perceived ills in those voters’ lives. That’s it. Deportations, imprisonment, concentration camps, extermination, they want everything he’s promised them and more.

And lest we forget, in another salient comparison to Hitler he also hates Jews. Trump’s stance on the Israeli Gaza crisis in support of Israel is only because he wants to wipe the Muslims from the face of the earth. Once that’s accomplished, he would gladly turn his hand without a second thought—like Hitler invading Poland and then neglecting to stop—to doing the very same to Jews in the Middle East. And he doesn’t try to hide it, either. Keith Olbermann, in a recent episode of Countdown, gave this completely uncontroversial description of Trump:
“He’s . . . a Nazi.

          Trump plays your roundup of the great antisemitic hits. He has insisted, repeatedly, that American
          Jews, “have to get their act together before it is too late.” He has repeatedly pushed the calumny
          that Jews are loyal to Israel and not the United States. At the White House on Hanukah, he
          referred to “your country.” He meant Israel. He had dinner with the avowedly antisemitic Nick
          Fuentes and Kanye West. He praised Hitler to former chief-of-staff John Kelly . . . This is not a
          complicated calculation. If Trump determined today, that he could get elected by beginning a full-
          fledged attack on Jewish people, Jewish influence, he’d do it. When we speak of him as having
          the soul of a mass murderer, that’s what we mean. People do not have any actual value to him.
          Reenact the Holocaust in whole or in part to get reelected, to stay out of jail? Of course he’ll do
          that—and to any group you could name.

When Hitler made a pact with the Soviet Union to partition Poland, he knew from the start he was never going to honor it, and intended all along to continue on into the Soviet Union and conquer the Russians as well. Trump’s implicit pact with his followers, that if they vote for him it will be the “others” who are punished, not them, means no more than Hitler’s. What Trump’s followers don’t understand—and have never understood, because Trump lies about it every chance he gets—is that he hates the people who vote for him just as much as he hates all the rest.

But the unvarnished truth is, these people who hate do not represent the majority of people in this county—just like they didn’t in pre-World War Two Germany. Trump lost in 2020 by nearly eight million votes, a landslide repudiation by any estimate. Unfortunately for all of us, however, the election was actually much closer than that because of an archaic voting system we have been saddled with, designed by wealthy elites in order to control the will of what they considered the ignorant masses. Democracy, sure, but representative democracy, a democracy that can be manipulated at the state level for the benefit of those who are really in charge, the corporate and wealthy donors who essentially employ politicians to work directly on their behalf, and only incidentally—if at all—for the voters who believe they have elected them. In the end, however, Trump was so objectively bad as a president, making the country pathetic in the eyes of the world, twiddling his thumbs while nearly a million people died of Covid-19 on his watch, and using the White House as his own personal base of criminal operations to benefit him and his children, that the majority of the people in this county had had enough. Therefore, when Biden won the election, church bells all over the world rang out with relief. So in that way, at least, Trump has no power at all. But that may not last much longer. Political machinations at the state level have ramped up considerably since 2020, in a desperate bid by Republican politicians who control state governments to rewrite election law in order to throw out votes they don’t like and install Trump as president even if he loses by another eight million votes, or more. The desperation comes from the fact that, if they don’t get Trump back in the White House in 2024, they very well might find themselves voted out of office.

It’s important to note, however, that this isn’t happening just because Trump lost. Trump is a symptom, not the cause of the electoral hijacking that is happening all across this country. Right-wing oligarchs, whether in the form of wealthy individuals like Charles Koch and his ilk, or the corporate-industrial complex that is run by those individuals, have been working to wrest complete control of the political system from the people for decades. And they’ve been playing a long game, in some ways going all the way back to 1789 and the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. But ever since the end of the Second World War and the beginning of a new war on the New Deal, Republicans have relied on stealth to achieve their aims. Subtle retraining of jurists to be friendly to big money, as well as not-so-subtle gerrymandering of state districts, have been accompanied by brainwashing of the electorate through a lengthy and elaborate system of propaganda designed to conflate the ideas of democracy and capitalism as if they were inseparable. Trump, however, was something they hadn’t counted on, much like Hitler. The right-wing hadn’t anticipated that his bugling ineptitude would expose for all to see the naked greed of the oligarchs controlling the entire Republican party apparatus. But while it has been exposed, that doesn’t mean that the electorate has been able to see it for what it really is.

At the same moment Trump kicked over the rock and sent the capitalist oligarchs scurrying for cover, a new system of propaganda had to be implemented by the right in order to obfuscate their takeover from within. That is when Fox New subtly shifted the message to their uneducated and mentally malleable right-wing voters from inuendo and implication to outright lies. Rather than suggesting that the truth may not be all it purports to be, instead they began simply lying, about everything, with no fear of rejection once a critical mass had been achieved. What’s interesting is that the same technique unleashed by Trump is now being used across the world by authoritarian dictatorships against their own people. Anne Applebaum, in a recent article in The Atlantic called “The New Propaganda War,” details how the trend in these countries mirrors what is going on in American right-wing propaganda.

          When Soviet leaders lied, they tried to make their falsehoods seem real. They became angry when
          anyone accused them of lying. But in Putin’s Russia, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, and Nicolás Maduro’s
          Venezuela, politicians and television personalities play a different game. They lie constantly, blatantly,
          obviously. But they don’t bother to offer counterarguments when their lies are exposed. (pg. 34-35)

Sound familiar? That’s why Trump’s followers will never hear a retraction from the propaganda networks they watch when those lies are exposed and debunked elsewhere. They just move on to the next barrage of lies. Internationally, the disinformation has a very different objective. “This tactic—” Applebaum notes, “the so-called fire hose of falsehoods—ultimately produces not outrage but nihilism. Given so many [lies], how can you know what actually happened” (pg. 35). The difference in the U.S. model is that the lies are meant to produce outrage, so along with the lies the anchors and hosts of Fox and their ilk also tell viewers how to feel about the lies. The real goal, of course, as far as the network is concerned, is simply to make money. The more viewers they can regularly deceive, the more they can charge for advertising, and their corporate clients—who don’t give a damn what this does to our country as long as they make money, too—are more than happy to have their brands associated with the propaganda if it’s going to increase their customer base.

What both flavors of deception have in common, however, is a decidedly anti-democratic agenda. For players like Putin and Xi of China, the goal is to discredit democracy in the eyes of their citizens so that they won’t get the idea that there’s something better out there. For the U.S. market, the goal is to pave the way for a right-wing authoritarian shift that will make the government manifestly beholden to corporate interests instead of barely concealed the way it has been for hundreds of years. The primary thrust of these lies has been through projection, disingenuously blaming the left for everything that the right is already doing. In that way they get on the record first, so if the propaganda networks are actually caught in their lies—as Fox was in the Dominion voting machine case—they can still make it seem as if is really the left that is attempting to shift the blame to them rather than anything the right is actually doing. Once the floodgates had opened on unfettered lying, other networks like Newsmax and OAN gleefully joined in to provide Internet-style unfiltered disinformation to their viewers on a twenty-four-seven basis. But it isn’t just the obvious right-wing lie machines that are participating in this deception, it’s also mainstream media as well.

It’s important for the American people to finally realize, once and for all, that the media is NOT objective. And it never has been. The media are corporate entities. They are businesses. And in a capitalist society their only function is to make money for their owners, executives, and stockholders. Their function is NOT to keep the public informed by telling the truth. In fact, it has been this fealty to the financial bottom line that finally broke CNN. Their misguided goal of appealing to both sides of the political electorate has backfired spectacularly. Viewers on the right, hardened into false beliefs by an amoral leader who lies every time he opens his mouth, are not going to sit still when presented with viewpoints that oppose the disinformation that has atrophied their already weak intellect. At the same time, intelligent viewers on the left are not going to abide a news network that regularly gives equal time to “opposing viewpoints” that are inherently and demonstrably false. Not when, at the very least, they can watch MSNBC or PBS and see Trump’s lies actually called lies—rather than legitimizing the lies by not calling them out, or worse yet, showing them in the first place. Yet even the most left-leaning news network, MSNBC, is still woefully inadequate in terms of the information they convey to viewers. And that is because MSNBC is a business, just like CNN, just like Fox, and just like the networks. What that means is that they are limited in what they can really say about politics in this country, because they are only allowed to talk about the politics itself, instead of who really controls that political process.

All of which brings us back to Nikki Haley and Chris Cillizza. The one statement Cillizza makes that contains an element of truth, is when he says about right-wing politicians, “The only path that exists for you to maintain some credibility with the Republican base is to be for Donald Trump.” That is true for the vast majority of Republican politicians, but it in no way explains Haley’s complete reversal of nearly everything she said in her campaign—or to a lesser extent the other Republican presidential candidates now kissing the former idiot-in-chief’s ass as if they are contestants in some kind of perverse, vice-presidential version of The Apprentice. He then goes on to emphasize that Haley has never been a politician who placed principles over pragmatism. But once again, that is not what’s going on here, and the fact that absolutely no one in the media is addressing the real reason why—though not surprising at all—is maddening. Haley is no different than any other politician in this country. They work for the people who pay them, and their employers are not the voters. Politicians work for the rich, corporate elites who pay them in all sorts of ways, from under the table bribes, to above board gifts from lobbyists, job offers and golden parachutes if they have done well for their employers. Their salary for working in government is the least of their reward and therefore gets the least of their effort. But the oligarchs made a serious miscalculation when it came to Trump, because they hadn’t accounted for his ability to tap into right-wing hatred. They believed that, like themselves, people can be controlled best through their desire for money—or in this case the illusory promise of money.

Then there is the fact that Trump is, objectively, the stupidest man to ever hold public office—perhaps in all of world history. While the oligarchs were willing to hold their noses during his first term, especially after he gave them trillions of dollars in tax cuts, the disastrous elections every two years since have convinced them that they need someone more traditional in the role, someone more in the mold of George W. Bush—a tool who could be controlled just like senators and representatives. They couldn’t really put anyone up against him in 2020 when he ran as an incumbent, but once he had lost they began to back alternatives like Chris Christie and Nikki Haley to forestall an inevitable rematch against Biden. That is the role that Nikki Haley played in the 2024 Republican primary race. She was a test balloon, a trial case. She was told to let Christie do all the heavy lifting—pun intended—at the beginning of the race, and after he dropped out to assume his role as the anti-Trump candidate in order to see what kind of numbers she could split off from his coalition of hate. She did well, probably better than expected and may have continued to do so. But while the rich are willing to spend liberally on things that will benefit them down the line, they don’t like to throw their money away. In this case they did not have the stomach for an entire drive to the convention if it was only going to come up short, and so they pulled Haley out of the race before her numbers could continue to build momentum. Demonstrating that it is the oligarchs who are actually the “political realists.”

They not only calculated that Haley would probably not be able to win the nomination, but also realized there was a point at which her candidacy might actually hurt Trump in the general election. Pragmatists to the core, they took her out of the game and forced her to eventually endorse the man-child she had been railing against for months. And she did it, not because she has any principles one way or the other, but because her employers told her to. Her role now, like that of all her other rivals in the primary, is to help get Trump elected, because while he is loathed by the very oligarchs who support him, they also stand to make more money with him in office than they will with Biden. Trump’s only real advantage in dealing with the oligarchs is their own greed. They could get rid of him if they wanted. It would be relatively easy, but it also might take a few election cycles to do it, if they had the will, which they don’t. Corporate elites are motivated by their greed and the lust for money and control, so being out of power for too long is an anathema to them. To be clear, they will continue to make obscene profits under a second Biden administration, just as they have during his first. After all, it was the oligarchs who infused the Biden campaign in 2020 with enough cash to overtake Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. That was because Bernie is a socialist. Biden, on the other hand, has been a friend to Big Credit his entire political career, and Delaware has become the headquarters for nearly every major credit card company in the U.S. But since the oligarchy can make more money under Trump, who plans to dismantle as much of the regulatory structure in government as humanly possible, the choice is really no choice at all.

The real reason that Republican politicians continue to support Trump, despite anything and everything derogatory he has ever said about them, is because they want to keep their jobs—their jobs working for the oligarchy, that is, not the people. You see, the oligarchy doesn’t really care who is in office. One Republican senator or representative is pretty much as good as the next. But if individual politicians don’t stay on Trump’s good side, then they risk losing their place at the trough. And if this sounds if it sort of reinforces Cillizza’s point, it doesn’t, because my point is a much larger one. The news media has been going on and on about Haley’s hypocrisy—just as Cillizza does—but never get to the real point, about who is really controlling her, and by extension every other politician in Washington. And that’s because those same oligarchs also control the media. The way they limit discourse isn’t by telling reporters what they can and can’t say, but by limiting the range of the discussion. Their anchors and pundits can talk all they want about the politicians themselves, and make any ideological point they wish. Right-wing or left, it doesn’t really matter . . . as long as the discussion doesn’t extend beyond politics to the oligarchs themselves. And they do this, not by direct coercion, but by making ideas like the “Deep State” synonymous with conspiracy theories like microchips in vaccines or Democratic pederast pizza rings. The only thing deep about the Deep State, however, is the deep pockets they have.

I realize all of this makes me look like a socialist crackpot with my own pet conspiracy theory. But how else can one explain the complete and utter lack of policy in today’s Republican party? There is no other explanation. The only thing they are committed to is dismantling democracy in order to facilitate their complete control over the citizens of this country. So the next logical question has to be why? Why are they doing that? Who benefits? The individual politicians benefit, of course, but exactly how? They certainly aren’t getting rich from their government salaries. So how else to account for all of the multi-millionaires in Congress? There’s nothing else that makes sense. But it’s not as if any of this is a secret. I continue to promote Nancy MacLean’s book Democracy in Chains, because it lays out the entire blueprint for what we are seeing acted out in Republican politics today . . . and in the oligarch’s own words. Big money capitalism is very close to owning this country. And if Trump gets reelected—for what promises to be the rest of his life—they will have gone a long way toward achieving their goal of a completely unregulated and untaxable haven for large-scale capitalism . . . the corporate state. But if anyone expects American news media to expose this scandal, and shine a light on the dystopian chasm we are on the precipice of being herded into, they are naïve at best, and deluded at worst.

The news media is the propaganda arm of capitalism. Thus, from their point of view everything political ends with politics. Politicians are simply out for themselves, or kowtowing to Trump in order to keep their jobs. Trump has taken over the Republican party and he controls everything because he’s a criminal, or crazy, or both. And right-wing politicians who support him have simply lost their minds. It doesn’t matter what the narrative is. In the news media everything ends with politics, because for them there is nothing beyond politics but a fictional Deep State that would be the height of journalistic irresponsibility to even suggest. And yet, even this is not new, as prescient voices from Adam Smith to Karl Marx to the Frankfurt School to Noam Chomsky have been warning us about this for nearly two-hundred and fifty years. But the news media has also successfully marginalized those voices of truth by characterizing their ideas as no different than the belief in Bigfoot or Atlantis. Sports and entertainment keep us distracted, smart phones and the Internet keep us addicted, culture wars keep us fighting with each other rather than the true enemy. And all the while the news media keeps reporting on politics like it’s the equivalent of a sports contest. Trump must be defeated in November, and I’m fairly hopeful that the American electorate will do its part to ensure that outcome. Just don’t expect the media to assist by providing voters with the truth, because the truth is, they have a very different agenda.

The Bigotry of the Literal Mind

Leave it to the great Lionel Trilling to bring clarity where once there was confusion. I have the complete works of Trilling on my bookshelves and regularly dip into them, not only for his insights into literature but, more importantly, for his insights on society. I even have the book, Why Trilling Matters, by Adam Kirsch, but I can save you the trouble with one sentence. Trilling matters because he didn’t believe in literature for literature’s sake; he believed in literature as one of the most important ways to understand our own morality, not just individual but social morality. One example of this comes in the title of an essay by his most influential professor, John Erskine. The title of the essay was, “The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent.” We see the startling effects of this today, as a large swath of proudly anti-intellectual voters regularly participate in the very immoral act of trying to elect immoral leaders to the highest offices in the land. And so their very lack of intelligence directly affects the rest of the populace in a decidedly negative way. Morality, unlike personal integrity, is a social construct because it has to do with the effect of people’s actions on others. Intellect is absolutely vital to this, precisely because it is our rational mind that allows us to comprehend the negative effects we can have on others through our actions, and hopefully avoid them. The fiercely ignorant, on the other hand, have absolutely no idea that they are willingly destroying themselves and utterly clueless that they are taking the rest of us with them in the process.

What Trilling taught me today, however, is not about the ignorance of the political right, but the ignorance of the political left. For years I have struggled to understand what writer and professor John McWhorter has described as the religion of Wokeness. The reason he puts it in those terms is because Woke ideology is founded on dogma rather than intellect. Dogma is something to be followed, adhered to unquestioningly, just like the sacred texts and teachings in a religion. So, as far as that goes, the greater part of the paradox of Wokeism can be thus understood by the fact that it is just as anti-intellectual as the MAGA right. That much I knew already, but it still didn’t explain why that was the case. And that in itself is another troubling aspect of society today, primarily in the media but increasingly infecting academia and all of American letters. I used to tell my students when I was teaching that the only question that matters is “why.” The reason for that is a “why” question forces the responder to begin with the word “because,” and therefore must always be followed by an explanation—requiring the responder to understand what it is they’re talking about in order to explain it. But with increasing frequently, writers of books and articles today do not have the intellectual capacity to explain anything, so instead they choose not to. Most writing today is primarily descriptive, which means that it is also primarily meaningless. Without explaining why something is the way it is, the mere fact that it is the way it is means relatively little.

So that’s the question that has haunted me about Woke ideology: why? Why would those on the left, liberals, who I take for granted believe in social equity, be so unflinchingly critical of other liberals, for absolutely idiotic reasons? It makes no sense. To begin at the beginning it’s important to realize that America’s public education system is primarily to blame. I witnessed firsthand the fact that the vast majority of teachers in classrooms have no interest in analysis or explanation—the “why” questions—but instead fall back almost exclusively on “what” questions, that is, recall of facts, identification, and description. The simple reason for this is that they themselves were never taught to analyze in school, so they obviously can’t teach it. The bitter irony, however, is that the reason public school classrooms wound up operating in this manner is because that’s exactly what they were designed to do. For the past hundred and fifty years, public education has been living up to its original intent of churning out good workers: wage-slaves who do not think, who do not question, and therefore are incapable of explaining why they are in the downtrodden position they find themselves in. They have been taught to believe in the most destructive of all American myths, the unquestioned good of Capitalism and the social-Darwinian pseudo-science of competition as the guiding principles of society. So given that context it really shouldn’t be a surprise that people indoctrinated by religion and public education are incapable of thinking for themselves, because they have been trained not to. And in the case of Woke, just as with MAGA, that is what everything else follows from.

The reality is, the dogma coming out of the Woke movement today is nothing new. It really began in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, when it became painfully obvious to almost everyone that it was the Republican policies of unrestrained capitalism that were to blame for the financial disaster that had befallen the United States and the rest of the world. At the time, people who continued to espouse making the rich even richer seemed especially abstruse and almost anti-American, in that it was not a leap at all to see that doing thus would simply punish suffering Americans even more. Following this idea was an offshoot that would regain momentum in a much broader social context eighty years later, and that was the belief that anyone working in a public sphere, be it Congress, a corporate CEO, or celebrity, has an obligation to society to voice only accepted liberal beliefs or they risk betraying society and becoming a de facto enemy to the liberal cause. Fortunately in the 1930s there was so much overwhelming political support for the New Deal, that the idea was never politically divisive the way it is today. There were still Republicans who tried to fight the New Deal, but by and large they were not politically successful. In the depths of the Depression, there were not a lot of politicians who had the temerity to deny outright the federal government’s obligation to help he citizens of the country through the worst economic crisis in history. Where this idea did manage to stay alive, though, was in literary criticism.

In an essay by Lionel Trilling entitled “Hemingway and his Critics,” written in 1938, the professor bemoaned the fact that this idea had taken root in literary circles and as a result it began causing authors to write in a specific way in order to prove their liberal credentials, rather than as their inspiration dictated. For Hemingway, as far as Trilling could tell, this had been a disaster as the self-conscious abandoning of his decidedly anti-liberal themes and symbols in his recent work had led to an inadvertent undermining of the power that had made him a great artist in the first place. Instead of simply being an artist, and creating works of art, Trilling now sensed that Hemingway was trying to write “as Hemingway,” the man, rather than ignoring critics and embracing the separation that had always, and will always, divide the creator from the created.

          One feels that Hemingway would never have thrown himself into his new and inferior work if the
          necessity had not been put upon him to justify himself before this magisterial conception of literature.
          Devoted to literalness, the critical tradition of the Left took Hemingway’s symbols for his intention,
          saw in his stories only cruelty or violence or a calculated indifference, and turned upon him a barrage
          of high-mindedness—that liberal-radical high-mindedness that is increasingly taking the place of
          thought among the “progressive professional and middle-class forces” and that now, under the name
          of “good will,” shuts out half the world. (Trilling 1980, 127)

The problem for liberal critics was that in his early work Hemingway told the truth, but by the end of the 1930s critics didn’t want to hear that anymore. Liberal-radical criticism only wanted to hear the truth as they saw it, an ideal of what should be rather than what was still left to overcome. And Trilling duly called them out, stating quite assertively, “what should have been always obvious is that Hemingway is a writer who, when he writes as an “artist,” is passionately and aggressively concerned with truth and even with social truth” (Trilling 1980, 127). When Trilling says these critics were “devoted to literalness,” what he meant was this: in writing about the social ills of the day, those critics could only see the truth as an endorsement of the status quo, rather than the reverse. What they lost the ability to do was understand that only by exposing the unvarnished truth in a context—in this case literary—in which that truth is believed in and acted upon by its characters, can that truth be seen in all its ugliness, can it be truly understood for the detrimental impact it is actually having on society. And this is the same misunderstanding that society is faced with today in the Woke movement, but infinitely worse as it has infected political discourse to the point where many on the left are so literal-minded that they have become utterly unable to grapple with the truth and, even more crucially, understand why it’s so incredibly important.

In providing an example to prove his point, Trilling made the genius move of citing Mark Twain’s novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. While it is the perfect example, it certainly didn’t come out of thin air, as Trilling cites Hemingway’s oft-quoted remark that all of American literature comes from Huckleberry Finn. Of course Hemingway never explained what he meant by that, and left it up to us to figure out why. What’s so frustrating is that no one, it seems, in the last hundred and forty years since its publication, has really understood the actual importance of Huckleberry Finn—perhaps not even Hemingway. It even seems clear that Trilling himself really didn’t know, not fully anyway. To be honest, Trilling had any number of things wrong over the years, but that’s not finally the point, because his message was never ultimately about literature in a vacuum. Trilling, as a teacher—not of literature, but through literature—was one of the greatest in all of U.S. history. Again, going back to public education, the fact that so many people over the decades have failed to understand the significance of Twain’s novel should not come as a surprise. Readers, critics, teachers, students, and especially blacks, have all been baffled for nearly a century and a half as to what the novel really does.

But let’s first begin with Trilling, as a way of understanding how the reading of the story of Huck Finn could go so terribly wrong. What Trilling does understand is that, “Huck’s prose is a sort of moral symbol” (Trilling 1980, 127). Why the qualifier, however, I have no idea, because Twain’s novel is entirely a moral symbol, the whole thing, which is the primary reason it has confused readers for so long. And Trilling is symbolic of this confusion himself, as he compares Woodrow Wilson to the Widow Douglas: “the pious, the respectable, the morally plausible.” It’s the final phrase, moral plausibility, that is crucial here, but unfortunately Trilling goes completely off the rails at that point, declaring that the novel is “the prose of the free man seeing the world as it really is.” No, no, no, no, no! That is not what Huck Finn is about. Huck is not a free man, even when he is out on the river! With only one exception, everything he sees along his journey is a reflection of who he already is, a slave to what Arthur Miller so eloquently called “the moral fashion of the day.” Huck believes that slavery is right, that blacks are inferior, and that Jim should be returned to his owner—throughout the entire trip. And that’s the whole point. Huck is supposed to be racist.

Trilling’s interpretation of the novel in terms of Hemingway, however, focuses on the lies that politicians like Wilson told the young men of that era, lies that led to their death and destruction in the First World War. Just as Huck had internalized the lies told to him about slavery, similarly the young men at the turn of the twentieth century had gone to war believing in the ideals professed by men like Wilson:

          To the sensitive men who went to war it was not, perhaps, death and destruction that made the
          disorganizing shock. It was perhaps rather that death and destruction went on at the instance and
          to the accompaniment of the fine grave words, of which Woodrow Wilson’s speeches were the
          finest and gravest. Here was the issue of liberal theory; here in the bloated or piecemeal corpse
          was the outcome of the words of humanitarianism and ideals; this was the work of presumably
          careful men of good will, learned men, polite men. (Trilling 1980, 128)

It’s actually quite a fascinating interpretation—as it relates to Hemingway. As it relates to Huckleberry Finn, however, it’s quite wrong. Huck does not change his view of slavery because of what he sees along the trip. What he sees of the world, “as it really is,” only goes to reinforce the ideas he’s been brought up with. His relationship with Jim prior to the trip, immersed as they both were in a slaveholding society, also reinforced his beliefs. What changed Huck was not the world, but spending an extended period with Jim outside of the world.

What pains me the most is how so many black critics and black academics have entirely missed the point of the novel, and still do. Twain’s novel is a work of genius, and not only does all of American literature begin with Huckleberry Finn, but I would go so far as to say it is the peak of American literature, the summit to which many have attempted but only Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird has come close to reaching. Sadly, blacks see the novel as inherently racist. They are embarrassed by the character of Jim. He’s uneducated and penniless, a superstitious man who never once questions the institution of slavery. But the thing is, he was written that way on purpose! The whole point of Twain’s novel is that Jim shouldn’t have to be educated, shouldn’t have to have money, shouldn’t have to be intellectual, and shouldn’t have to be a social critic against slavery. He should be respected and treated like a human being because he is a human being, not for the way he behaves. The whole point of Huckleberry Finn is that it’s not Jim’s fault for the way he’s treated. The onus for change is entirely the responsibility of whites. Huck is the one who needs to change, not Jim. And that’s just what Twain does.

It’s no coincidence that the Widow Douglas and her sisters are both Bible thumpers. The Bible is one of the first how-to manuals for owning slaves. It’s a slavery-positive piece of literature. It’s no wonder that God-fearing Southern slave owners we so confident in their conviction that slavery was endorsed by the God of the Bible—because it is! That was the world Huck was brought up in and that’s very much what he believed at the beginning of the story. One of the most powerful scenes in the book then, is when Huck makes the decision that he would rather go to Hell than make Jim go back to his owner. In that instance his own personal integrity became more important than the social conscience he had inherited. Huck makes the decision, for himself, about what is right, rather than listening to what the rest of society believes. And if that means he has to argue his case before God himself in the afterlife, then he’s willing to do it. Finally, the real climax of the novel comes when Huck describes Jim in the only way he knows how. When Jim tells the story of coming out of hiding to help the doctor with the wounded Tom Sawyer, knowing Jim was giving up his chance at freedom but refusing to turn his back on a friend, Huck tells the reader, “I knowed he was white inside, and I reckoned he’d say what he did say.” What Huck expresses in this simple sentence is the very essence of racial equality, that all people are the same inside, no matter what they look like on the outside. All people are the same . . . because they’re all people. In his novel, published in 1884, Mark Twain was able to convey to the entire nation the reality of racial injustice: that whites began it, and whites need to end it. The responsibility for ending racism has nothing to do with the behavior of blacks.

The problem is, this makes absolutely no sense to modern readers. One of the cardinal rules in writing fiction always used to be “show” the reader what’s happening rather than “tell.” But people today do not have the ability to understand what they are being shown, and so without an author telling them what’s going on they are incapable of seeing what an author like Twain is really doing. Just as with Trilling’s literal-minded critics, today's modern critics see only a racist novel, an embarrassing stereotype of a black slave, along with an abused white boy who travels down the river to find freedom. But the physical freedom Huck achieves at the end of the story is absolutely nothing compared to the freedom of thought he achieves in realizing that he has to make up his mind for himself about what is right and wrong, and not go along blindly with what society or the Bible has taught him to believe. Freedom of thought, however, seems to be alien to the radical Woke crowd, who for some unfathomable reason believe that it’s racist for whites to do anything to help blacks—and yet all the time castigate whites for their “unconscious” racist behaviors. The whole exercise is not only dumbfounding, it’s just plain dumb. And does absolutely nothing to solve the problem! The inability of the Woke warriors to think in any way but literally—when it comes to dogma; the dogma itself is wildly fictitious—has turned them into blithering idiots who adhere to nonsensical strictures instead of thinking for themselves. And yet if an uneducated teenager, “so ignorant, and so kind of low-down and ornery,” as Huck describes himself, in the 1840s can figure out how to think for himself, the question for the radical Woke mob becomes, “What’s your excuse?”

A Notable Day in Left-Wing Media

After eight long years the left-wing media has finally begun to grasp what has been going on ever since the stupidest man in history descended down the escalator into our lives in an attempt to destroy the United States of America from within. In their defense, however, it wasn’t as if this has been easy to explain. For one thing, it is unprecedented, and without any historical parallels for comparison things are understandably more difficult to comprehend. The closest analogy we’ve had is the Nazi takeover of Germany early in the previous century, but even that has failed to instruct us because the circumstances are so very different today. I’ve been struggling with the same inability to describe this attempted fascist takeover in a way that makes sense of what we’ve all been experiencing. Ironically, it has taken the 2024 Republican debates—possibly the most pointless and insignificant event in U.S. political history—to clear the haze and put the destruction of democracy we’ve been witnessing into relief and allowed the left-wing media to finally grasp—in a way they really hadn’t before—the question that Marvin Gaye put to us fifty years ago: “What’s going on?”

This day of days begins with a preamble, what Keith Olberman has labeled Trump’s numerous Fatwas: calls for his most violent and deranged followers to kill his political and criminal-justice “enemies.” This is criminal behavior, and the direct result of it being left unchecked has made things infinitely worse by allowing him feel that there are no consequences for his actions. Trump believes, justifiably, that this country lacks the political and moral will to do whatever is necessary to save democracy from a demagogue in waiting. And so he behaves accordingly, and we are left to suffer the consequences. From the moment he stepped out of office and was not ushered immediately into a jail cell, the government and justice system in this country has been negligent in its duty to its citizens, and we continue to pay the price. Olberman stated the desperate need to put Trump behind bars in order to stop his calls for political violence and murder this way:

          If it makes us look for a time like a third-world country, or it makes the current president look like
          he is prosecuting a political rival, or if it makes it seem as if one political party is trying to put another
          political party behind bars . . . so be it!  Because what happens if we do not act against Trump now,
          now, now, is far worse! . . . We continue to head down a road to utter disaster in this country, where
          Trump’s belief that he and everything connected to him is more important than the entirety of the
          lives and welfare of every other citizen of the United States of America, where that belief is going to
          lead to open systemic violence here. And it is his fault. And he must be . . . Well, let me just use his
          words, from that post about Judge Engoron: “This political hack must be stopped.”

Tangential to this, but still decidedly on-brand, is the failed former president’s promise—right out of the dictator playbook—to arrest those in the media who have the temerity to tell the truth about his undemocratic, un-American, unethical and criminal behavior. And yet the sad truth is that the news media has been entirely unwilling to tell the truth about Trump, or call for accountability, as the media itself serves the corporate power structure in this country that Trump is helping to enrich, not the people it purports to serve. MSNBC, which certainly has its flaws, has been the only major news outlet to consistently label Trump’s lies as lies, and to point out the avalanche of attempts by Republicans to normalize his behavior through false equivalences on the left. CNN, which has failed utterly in its attempt to be balanced by refusing to acknowledge the incredible imbalance in what the right-wing is claiming, has by now been fully discredited in the eyes of anyone who can see the truth. And network news has been no better. But beyond that, what uneducated whites in this country are left with, is what I call the Fake-News-Industrial Complex. It’s one thing to call Fox News a propaganda network—which it is, a right-wing disinformation arm of the capitalist oligarchy—but no one until now has been quite as precise as Keith Olberman in explaining exactly how that system really works.

          The extraordinary sweep of right-wing television news networks and streaming services and pod-
          casts and radio and conspiracy theorists and publishers, the whole complex running the gamut from
          Alex Jones to Fox News to [Joe] Rogan . . . is bankrolled by one or more conservative billionaires
          who are delighted if they invest fifty million dollars and get back, ah, buck ninety-seven. Because
          the rest of the money, the other forty-nine million plus has been well-spent buying and creating
          public opinion, and fomenting an environment of stupidity and hate and rage that makes a trans-
          parent, two-bit con man like Trump seem like George Washington . . . The machine is well-oiled
          and perfected. At the fringes the John Solomons and the gateway pundits and people like that,
          make stuff up. And then places like One America News quote them. By the end of the week Fox
          has taken the story, suitably washed, with lots of places they can quote so they don’t have to claim
          they made it up, and Fox is taking that story and devoting seven shows a day to it.

As bad as Fox News was before, it was Trump who really opened the door to a way of talking to the right-wing base that is based not just on inuendo and rumor as it used to be, but on complete lies. Nowhere is this more evident than in Trump’s counter-programming against the most recent Republican debate. The event spurred left-wing podcaster David Pakman to opine, “Failed former president Donald Trump, yesterday engaged in the closest thing I recall he or any American politician doing that is this close to overt Russian- or North Korean-style propaganda.” It seems natural to feel this statement must be hyperbolic in some way, but unfortunately it’s not. Trump was refused an audience with the United Auto Workers, who are presently on strike, and instead was offered a podium before a group of non-union workers at which he pretended to be pro-union, and lied about his support for union workers. But beyond that, he had people in the audience holding up signs reading “Union Members for Trump,” who when questioned later admitted that they weren’t union members at all. The best summation of his blatant deception came from Pod Save America host, Dan Pfeiffer: “Trump doesn’t mention that he was the most anti-worker president in history, who passed a tax cut that most of the benefits went to the rich and encouraged and led to more offshoring of American jobs, who got rid of overtime pay for eight million Americans, costing them more than a billion dollars in wages.” Ask Trump any policy question and he will gush about how great he is, how he has done more than anyone else on the topic, and done it better . . . without giving one, single specific. The reason for that is he can’t, because all of his bluster is a lie.

The question that has haunted me since the Insurrection is, why do his followers believe his lies? But the simple answer is, they don’t. Their agenda—one that Trump offered them, and they accepted—has nothing to do with the truth. And the reason why they don’t care about the truth, is what has led at last to an explanation for the lurch toward fascism that a sizeable portion of the electorate now seems eager to embrace. It was Rachel Maddow, in a post-debate roundtable, who finally articulated what the entirety of the political left has been unable to fathom thus far, a genuine explanation for this inexplicable behavior:

          I feel like what’s happening in this Republican primary, and what’s happening in Republican
          politics right now, is that the Republican party, the Republican base, the Republican electorate,
          has effectively decided that they don’t really want to do politics anymore. And they’re not all that
          interested in what politics is, and governing and political campaigning and policy competition
          and all that stuff. They’re not interested in it. They would prefer to have a strong man, a particular
          strong man who they already know and who they like, and they would prefer to have that . . .
          a strong man who is going to end politics.

That, in a nutshell, explains the desire for fascism. It’s one-party rule for people who are fed up with politics. What’s so fascinating is that they’re not altogether wrong. Politics, as I’ve said many times before, is theater. It’s not real. It’s the outward manifestation of a capitalist control structure that uses wealth and power to manipulate the country from behind a curtain. Just as they do in media, they control the political process through money and influence to essentially purchase the policies they want enacted from their employees in Congress and the White House who are paid to do their bidding. Where the real disconnect comes is that the people can feel it but they don’t have the education and the rational facility to truly understand why they feel that way. They hate politics, but instead of trying to understanding why they hate it in order to do something productive to change it, they would rather destroy it all together.

But where Maddow was able to finally articulate this point, it was Joy Reid who took the idea to its logical conclusion.

          The Republican party exists in a world in which, demographically, six out of the seven last
          presidential elections, they can’t win the popular vote. Because the dispersion of [inclusive]
          communities [and ideas] makes it very hard for them to win through conventional politics . . .
          Voter suppression is the only way; gerrymandering is the only way they can actually get what
          they want because what they want is so unpopular that when you put their ideas through the
          political process, they can’t win . . . So when you think about it, all of politics has enraged a
          certain group of Americans who can not win through politics. So what do you go to? You go
          to autocracy. What do you do when something like forty percent of American adults have
          given up on politics, and say, politics isn’t the answer, give me a strong man who can impose
          my minority position on the rest of you?

And that is the real question. What do we do? Because this is where the parallels with Nazi Germany finally do come into play. There were no politics in Nazi Germany, no political arguments, no debates, no Reichstag intrigue, because they had done away with political parties altogether. With only one party in control of everything the populace never had to be bombarded with political wrangling, and this is what the followers of Trump apparently want, because the result of all that is that Nazi Germany also had no need for elections. But people need to be careful what they wish for, because there are other less savory aspects of fascist rule. Again, on this same post-debate coverage, it was former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele who, in talking to Maddow, expressed the fundamental problem with fascism, a dangerous and deadly problem that the vast majority of its proponents are completely unequipped to understand.

          They want a strong man. They want to own the libs. They want to take out their opponents.
          They don’t want to hang out with people who look like me [black]. They don’t want to talk to
          people who look like you, and act like you [homosexual], and live where you live. And this
          is the America they’re trying to set up, because they think they’ll feel safer in it. They think
          they will be safer in it. And the reality of it is, no, you won’t, because at a certain point it comes
          back on you, too, [when] you suddenly become “other” to someone else in that group.

It’s an old saw, but it was never truer than in this moment: when people put in place mechanisms to discriminate, disenfranchise, and destroy people they don’t like, they unwittingly put themselves in a position where those mechanisms can be used against them as well.

As notable as this day was for left-wing media in finally making sense of the fascist motivation of the right-wing electorate, they have all failed miserably in their obligation to move beyond politics and expose the true force behind the chaos. Corporations and wealthy individuals have been poisoning our country for hundreds of years. Their all-consuming quest to acquire ever more, at the expense of the rest of us, has led to an economic imbalance the likes of which threaten to return this country to a horrifying version of its past in which wage slavery in the north was nearly indistinguishable from the chattel slavery in the south, a past in which people were forced to work for starvation wages, living and dying in tenements and slums, unable to afford health care, unable to clothe and feed their children, afforded not even the most basic of human rights in a country that was one of the richest in the world. But even that is not the end game. What the capitalist oligarchy really wants is to turn this country into an anarchist hell-hole in which lawlessness reigns and people are encouraged to hate and harm each other instead of those responsible for their plight, where the only rights are the rights afforded by wealth and position, an autocracy kept in power through intimidation and death, in which the people are disenfranchised and downtrodden and pitted against each other, and where the rich are given a free hand to abuse the people and the land in any way they see fit in order to acquire even more. The day that is on the evening news, is the day this country will have finally turned the corner. But until that day comes it is incumbent upon the rest of us to use the political and legal avenues we still have available to us, and to resist the urge to give up and allow the fascist takeover of a country that is still very much worth saving.