Journalist Gil Duran has been following this new movement of tech billionaires who are heavily influencing right wing politics in America. They are way more out there than I realized. I just went down the rabbit hole to read these articles and frankly I’m a bit unnerved. You might want to pour yourself a strong drink before you do it: I’ve spent this year writing for the @newrepublic about how a group of Silicon Valley billionaires has gone WEIRD. Now their weirdness is mating up with Trump’s MAGA weirdness in the 2024 election. Here’s a few things to understand about these guys. #1: They despise democracy. These Trump-loving billionaires believe democracy is bad. They want to create their own corporate dictatorships called Network States. They are actively trying to build these weird little dictator cities all over the world. The People of Solano County Versus the Next Tech-Billionaire Dystopia If these Silicon Valley plutocrats have their way, a swath of Solano County will be transformed into their own nation-state. #2. They want control over existing governments.
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This is Reform UK. This is Tice. Just an average British person, but he’s a British British Person. Don’t be fooled. Be vigilant. pic.twitter.com/dvA62e2Viz — Christopher Green (@GreeneyOfficial) November 24, 2023 This is old and it shows that there were always people who didn’t buy into the white supremacy and authoritarianism that characterized much of the America Trump and his followers think was so great. Those better people managed to beat them back and they can do it again.
It was early fall 1969, my senior year of high school, and the guy sitting in front of me turned around and asked whether I’d heard “Abbey Road” yet. I’d known Charles for two years, but not well. I was … Continue reading
We won’t move on! “Get out and vote just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore,” Donald Trump told The Believers’ Summit, hosted by Turning Point Action on Friday in West Palm Beach, Fla. “Four more years it will be fixed. It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore…In four years you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good your not gonna have to vote.” Democrats piled on Donald Trump’s comments to the Christian nationalists (no, not conservative Christians) on Friday: Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who is running for Senate, shared the clip of Trump’s speech on X, writing, “This year democracy is on the ballot, and if we are to save it, we must vote against authoritarianism. Here Trump helpfully reminds us that the alternative is never having the chance to vote again.” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) called Trump’s comments “terrifying.” And Rep.
It’s raining coconuts “There are years when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen. This was one of those decades-long weeks,” Wisconsin Democrats chair Ben Wikler tweeted on Friday. Politico at the start of a new week: Kamala Harris pulled in $200 million in her first week as a presidential candidate, a staggering figure the campaign points to as evidence of the intensity surrounding her nascent bid with 100 days to go before Election Day. What a difference a week makes, Politico not-so-trenchantly observes. With Harris ascending to the top of the ticket, the party saw mammoth fundraising, including topping the $100 million mark in her first full day as the Democrats’ likely nominee. The campaign soon announced she had secured enough verbal commitments from delegates to secure the party’s nomination ahead of the Democratic National Convention next month. Of the seven-day haul, two-thirds of the donations came from first-time donors, something the campaign pointed to as evidence of overwhelming grassroots support for her historic White House bid.
Trump should have listened to him Politico playbook: The WSJ editorial board is joining the pile-on over Sen. JD VANCE’s (R-Ohio) comments about “childless cat ladies.” In a tough piece posted last night, Paul Gigot and colleagues call the comment “the sort of smart-aleck crack that gets laughs in certain right-wing male precincts” but that “doesn’t play well with the millions of female voters, many of them Republican, who will decide the presidential race.” They see the speed and breadth of the coverage of Vance’s remark as evidence “that this is Mr. Vance’s first big cultural impression, and not a good one.” They are unimpressed with Vance’s efforts to clean things up on Megyn Kelly’s podcast yesterday (“he wasn’t at all apologetic”), and they come away with this surprising conclusion about the episode: “One possibility is that at some level Mr. Vance really doesn’t respect people who make different life choices.” And then they move on to attack some of Vance’s other past ideas.
Nobody does it better: Fox viewers don’t get to hear this normally. It takes someone skilled to do it and Buttigieg is very skilled. If you follow the Never Trumper Sarah Longwell and her focus groups (which are fascinating) you have heard for months now that the Democrats needed to get the surrogates out on the road. I think some of her rationale was that Biden wasn’t doing a good job of making he case and so needed to be shored up. But it’s important even with Harris at the top of the ticket. As you can see, Buttigieg is just excellent. Here’s a guy speaking to the non-Fox audience and he’s excellent too: Another one: Those last three are auditioning for VP right now and they’re all good. And there are a lot more where that came from who aren’t on that list: Whitmer, Newsom, AOC, Wes Moore, Pritzker and on and on. The Democrats have a very impressive bench. The Republicans have imploded leaving them with people like Vance and Elon Musk — nutcases just like Trump. The battle for the soul of the country as Biden has always said is now a battle for the brain of the country.
I know most of you would rather stick chopsticks in your ears than watch an entire Trump rally. But you should know that he’s actually getting worse. And he’s admitting it. Rather than post all the highlights, you might want to watch this video which also features some clever commentary: He also appeared at a Bitcoin convention. Oh dear:
I watched the video of this yesterday and it made me sick. Sonya Massey’s last words before a Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office deputy shot and killed her in her Springfield, Illinois, home earlier this month were, “I’m sorry.” The 36-minute body camera footage released Monday depicting her July 6 killing showed her interaction with the officers she called for help began calmly enough. At times, it even appeared to veer into light-hearted conversation as they responded to her 1 a.m. local time report of a possible home invasion. But the tone changed suddenly just under 15 minutes into the exchange after the 36-year-old Black woman went to remove a pot of boiling water from her stove at the direction of Deputy Sean Grayson, who informed her with a laugh as she did so that he was distancing himself to get away “from your steaming hot water.” “Away from the hot steaming water?
Authors Peter Dreier, who teaches politics at Occidental College and Maurice Isserman who teaches history at Hamilton College warn people who care about the Palestinian people not to protest at the DNC next month if they don’t want to set back their cause: In a democracy, protest movements can play a vital role in reshaping the national debate on important issues. But they have to hone their message and choose when and how to make their case. There were major protests at all three Democratic conventions in the 1960s. Two of them eventually got the results they hoped for. One backfired. In 1960, when John F. Kennedy was nominated in Los Angeles, civil rights protesters, including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., carefully orchestrated a 5,000-person march and daily pickets at the convention demanding a strong pro-civil rights plank in the Democratic platform. It was a first at a convention, and Kennedy was cautiously supportive, though it took several more years of protests before he embraced the Civil Rights Act, which became law in 1964, the year after his assassination. When Lyndon B.