Over the last couple of years, Tulsi Gabbard has become a supporter of all things Trump, including many of the (repulsive) Republican candidates the former president endorses.
Ask yourself how any person of integrity can suddenly stand behind an obvious criminal.
We all understand that she has presidential ambitions, but doesn’t honesty matter?
Refusing to concede an election isn’t a crime.
Attempting to overturn the results of an election is a felony, punishable by five years in prison.
Is there anyone who isn’t predicting sky-high turnouts at the midterm elections?
I can only imagine how inundated with political advertising people who live in states with contentious races must be. If you’re in Pennsylvania, for instance, you’re either going to elect a progressive recovering from a stroke, or a billionaire snake oil salesman from New Jersey. That must be pretty damn captivating, regardless of which side of the fence you’re on.
In Georgia, it’s either the incumbent Democrat, or a pathological liar and true moron. Who can stay home?
Moreover, all these races are, to one degree or another, referenda on Donald Trump. You either stand for rule of law, or you don’t.
Let your voice be heard. But again, I’m not sure you need any urging.
FWIW, the phenomenon shown below is real, as I realized at a neighbor’s 4th of July party, where I was (I believe) the only progressive.
A guy who was both astonished and infuriated that I had voted for Biden refused to give me his name, saying, “You could turn me in. The FBI is rounding up all Trump supporters.”
“Gosh, I was unaware of that,” I replied, in keeping with my policy of refraining from arguing with crazy people.
Now, is this insanity statistically significant in our polls? I doubt it.
Unlimited growth on a planet of finite size means ecological catastrophe in the near future, certainly by the end of this century. Here’s a video that lays this out, all too clearly.
As I replied to the host of a radio show on which I was a guest and asked to define sustainability: “There are dozens of ways of putting this. My favorite is ‘meeting our needs as a society without precluding future generations from meeting theirs.'” That, in turn, means transforming our culture from one of robo-consumerism to one of “living small.”
As suggested here, a large and receptive audience of ignorant and hateful people is an absolute requirement for the success of people like Alex Jones and Donald Trump.
That’s an insoluble problem in America, when you think about it. Jones is soon to be bankrupt, and Trump will be facing a variety of criminal charges, which will remove them both from the scene, but all that ignorance and hate aren’t going anywhere.
What will rise from the ashes? There is only one possible answer: smarter versions of Jones/Trump, people who have learned from the mistakes of their predecessors, but who tap into the audience’s enduring characteristics.
Trump does spread conspiracy theories, and Trump will pay a heavy price.
But, unlike the Alex Jones case, one won’t cause the other. The heavy price that Trump will pay will be the result of other things: election tampering, seditious conspiracy, theft of classified government documents, and obstruction of justice.
There is no doubt that the danger that the U.S. lives with on a day-to-day basis has been reduced with Trump out of office, and, to a degree, that really is a relief.
Yet his presence on the political scene, and the threat that, even if he doesn’t run again in 2024 that he’ll get away with attempting to overthrow the federal government remains all too real.
Moreover, thanks in large measure to Trump, we all live in a post-truth world, where politicians face no accountability for spewing tens of thousands of bald-faced lies. An entire party lives on a steady diet of the rejection of science, the notion of white superiority, the idea of trickle-down economics, and the banning of books.
I wish I could say that all this will dry up and blow away, but I can’t.
Philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti was a figure to whom few of us growing up in the late 20th Century had any real exposure. Sadly, his impact on our culture has only diminished since.
He was a more serious thinker than musician John Lennon, though they both “preached from the same gospel” of love.
When we contemplate the goal of a sustainable civilization, it’s hard to see how this can happen outside of the love for those around us.
The mobilization of Big Oil, and its impact on the political scene in the early part of the 20th Century, resulted in the destruction of the enormous network of electricity-based public transportation that stood in place at the time.
Now, almost exactly a century later, our society struggles against that precise same machine in its effort to phase out fossil fuels in favor of clean energy.
