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Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

View this post on Instagram A post shared by King Jamal (@jamalhinton12) Many of you have probably already heard this story. It’s apparently a huge viral social media sensation that’s been out there for 8 years. I had never heard it. (Where have I been?) Wanda Dench, aka “Thanksgiving Grandma,” and her unlikely friend, Jamal Hinton, have simple words of advice for Americans this year — Spend the holiday with family. The Arizona residents have shared Thanksgiving together every year since a Nov. 2016 text meant for Dench’s grandson was instead received by a then 17-year-old Hinton. Their friendship has become as much a staple of the holiday as cranberry sauce and football, and their life journeys have in some ways become emblematic of the country’s course. The 67-year-old Dench lost her husband early in the pandemic and is now in between cancer treatments. “You really never know when (will be) the last time you have a dinner with someone, or be able to talk to someone,” Hinton said in an interview with The Arizona Republic while recalling a recent conversation with Dench.

Actually, he’s down to 1.5 but who’s counting?

I don’t know why he does this gross thing on every holiday but I do know that it’s now considered normal for the leader of the United States to act like an absolute ass in public all the time. I guess that’s what half the voters wanted. And then there’s this:

Resistance is not futile yet It may feel as if half the U.S. has been hit with a Cordyceps brain infection that mindlessly seeks to spread submission to autocracy. But take heart. Pockets of resistance remain. In the former Soviet republic of Georgia, for instance (BBC): Riot police in Georgia used pepper spray and water cannon against protesters who turned out on the streets of Tbilisi after the government suspended moves to join the European Union. Forty-three people were arrested at the demonstrations in the capital on Thursday night, the government said. Crowds turned out after Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze said his government would drop its pursuit of EU membership “until the end of 2028” – a move criticised by more than 100 diplomats on Friday as “unconstitutional”. Kobakhidze had accused the bloc of “blackmail” after EU legislators called for last month’s parliamentary elections in Georgia to be re-run. They cited “significant irregularities”.

Why does the right eat our lunch again? The existence of the infamous Powell memo (1971) is no secret to most lefty activists or to anyone who has listened to Thom Hartmann for more than 30 minutes. Movement conservatism sprouted in the 1970s in reaction to the social changes and liberalizing legislation of the 1960s. But the pushback was likely planted in the wake of Barry Goldwater’s landslide 1964 loss to Lyndon Johnson. Influential, deep-pocketed Republicans, back when they were also conservatives, knew their ideas were unpopular. They decided they needed a long-term marketing strategy to fulfill their antidemocratic visions for American oligarchy. Democrats (naively) never answered with marketing of their own. See, our ideas are popular, as self-evident as the Declaration’s ideals. They need no marketing. And here we are, decades later, facing an oligarchy led by a criminal autocrat bent on tearing down the country to its foundations. And the foundations too. Some of us who have been in this business since the Earth was young (O.G. Original Progressive Bloggers) reflect regularly on what might have been. Perhaps we’ll move from there to what to do now.

The Brazilian government indicted Jair Bolsonaro this week on charges that he tried to stage a coup to overturn the election in 2022. They are damning. Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, has moved a step closer to jail after a federal police investigation laid bare what it called a murderous authoritarian plot to explode the country’s democratic system with a military coup that the far-right populist allegedly helped mastermind. Bolsonaro has repeatedly denied involvement in an attempt to overturn the result of the 2022 presidential election, which he narrowly lost to his leftwing rival Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. But on Tuesday, an 884-page federal police report accused the former army captain of taking a lead role in planning and organizing the conspiracy and trying to persuade the most senior members of the military to join the criminal enterprise. Several top members of the armed forces allegedly agreed, including the commander of the navy, Adm Almir Garnier Santos, and the army’s ground operations commander Gen Estevam Theophilo.

If you have time to watch this talk by pollster Cornell Belcher, (assuming you have the stomach for this kind of analysis right now) I urge you to do it. Whether he’s right is beyond my ken, but I found it interesting. David Neiwert, an expert on white identity movements, takes a stab at why that might have happened: @davidneiwert.bsky.social: It’s one of the more popular lines of self-flagellation Democratic Party critics and strategists have taken in the wake of the disastrous 2024 election: Harris and her “identity politics” caused many voters, including minorities, to look elsewhere. 2/15 @davidneiwert.bsky.social: But as Tressie McMillan Cottom already observed, Harris in fact tended to deemphasize the racial aspects of her historic candidacy and worked hard to win over Republican voters—to little avail: 3/15 www.nytimes.com/2024/11/06/o… @davidneiwert.bsky.social: Nonetheless, the New York Times proclaimed that the results were about how “Identity Politics Loses Its Grip on the Country”—thereby erasing Trump’s obvious and pronounced white identity politics, which were they key to his victory.

After 250 years of armed attacks, forced relocations, ethnic cleansing, and genocide of Native Americans, the U.S. military wants to celebrate.

The post Happy Native American Heritage Month From the Army That Brought You the Trail of Tears appeared first on The Intercept.