2024 Archives

Before considering the details of how Republicans have, for the past 40-plus years, waged a war against the right to vote for all but wealthy white people (and why Democrats did the same before the GOP picked up the mantle in the 1960s), it’s important to understand why each party historically has worked to manipulate the electorate to its own favor. The Democratic Party’s antipathy toward voting had roots deep in the 19th century, in the years following the Civil War. That war, and the subsequent 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution pushed through by Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans, gave pretty much all adult men, regardless of race, the right to vote. Thomas Jefferson had founded the Democratic Party (it was then called the Democratic Republican Party, but the “Republican” part was dropped in the late 1820s and early 1830s), and throughout the 19th century that party (as opposed to the Whigs and the Republicans) was closely associated with support for slavery.

If Democrats survive the onslaught that's coming and emerge victorious at the federal level, the first order of business next year must be to strip the cancer of dark money out of our body politic... Get ready: massive pools of dark rightwing money are soon going to clobber us. Will Democracy survive this onslaught by the morbidly rich? Democrats are giddy right now; the substantial lead that Trump had held over Biden for months has largely vanished as the match-up has changed to Harris and Walz. In the ten polls aggregated by RealClearPolitics since Biden's withdrawal, Trump has lost 3 points and only leads by one. In the DailyKos/Civiqs poll Harris leads Trump 49/45, Reuters puts the race at 43/42, and Morning Consult has it at 47/46. Trump is blustering in ways that indicate he thinks he's losing (yesterday's presser at his shabby golf motel was particularly pathetic), while JD Vance's poll numbers are in the toilet…or the couch…and showing no indication of recovery any day soon. That said, other lessons from this and recent past years should keep Democrats from easing up or becoming overconfident. The official beginning of the election season is still almost a month away, and the big money pledged by rightwing and neofascist billionaires hasn't even shown up yet.

Tim Walz is the antidote to the Fox "News" poison that is now so widely imitated across the rightwing ecosystem, embracing the hearts and minds of millions... All across America families are in mourning: their parents and grandparents, particularly the men in their lives, have been stolen from them by the rightwing hate and rage machine. Jen Senko produced a movie — The Brainwashing of My Dad — about losing her own father to Fox "News"; it was also made into a book of the same title. She's been a guest on my show a few times and her story is one replicated across America millions of times: her father — a totally normal Midwestern guy — began watching Fox "News" when he retired and within a year had become withdrawn, bitter, angry, and filled with hate. Jen and her family staged an intervention and locked Fox out of Dad's TV with the child lock option built into her cable system; within a few months, back to watching normal TV news like CNN, MSNBC, and BBC, Dad made a full recovery from the temporary mental illness Murdoch's infamous hate machine had thrown him into. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is America's intervention against the mind poison Trump, Fox "News," and rightwing hate radio have infected our nation with.

The result was that science, culture, and human rights — and even the exploration of any religious doctrine not authorized by Church authorities — were frozen for a "dark" thousand years… Want a repeat of the Dark Ages? Just put religion in charge of government. Donald Trump and JD Vance, who recently converted to Catholicism, are the political leaders of a movement to convert America's form of governance from a secular democratic republic into a fundamentalist white Christian ethnostate. In this, they're joined by the six Catholic Republican justices on the Supreme Court who've already imposed their church's religious doctrine on the rest of us with their Dobbs decision. Trump's doing this to bring in the fundamentalist Protestant and Catholic vote; Vance is apparently a true believer. In both cases they threaten to throw America into a new Dark Age resembling, in a worst case scenario, the rule of the mullahs who replaced Iran's secular democracy with a theocratic state. It's useful to look at what happened to Europe when, around the 6th century, the newly formed Catholic Church took over most of that continent and ruled it with an iron fist for at least nine centuries, an era we refer to as "the Dark Ages."