The Politics of Deplorability

I’m going to start with an old joke. I should warn you here that it’s a bit of an off-color joke, but it illustrates the point I really want to make here. Consider this an advance apology and a warning. Here’s the story, via Quote Investigator:

“They are telling this of Lord Beaverbrook and a visiting Yankee actress. In a game of hypothetical questions, Beaverbrook asked the lady: ‘Would you live with a stranger if he paid you one million pounds?’ She said she would. ‘And if be paid you five pounds?’ The irate lady fumed: ‘Five pounds. What do you think I am?’ Beaverbrook replied: ‘We’ve already established that. Now we are trying to determine the degree.”

I think the joke is pretty obvious. Now onto Hillary Clinton and the Basket of Deplorables. First, I actually do disagree with the language used, but that’s just because rhetorically it’s weird. Neither here nor there, though. One reason most politicians are trained lawyers is that at its core, politics is about making a case. Either for yourself or against the other person and very often doing both at the same time. I’ve long maintained that the way to win this election is to make it a referendum on the other person. Look – I think Clinton will be a fine President, she’s almost too qualified, and I would vote her against any of the clowns that currently occupy the smoking crater of the GOP. But the simple fact is that a majority of Americans have an unfavorable view of her, and you play the hand you’re dealt. Both Trump and Clinton by definition have to paint this election as the lesser of two evils, because a majority of voters think they’re both pretty evil.

Clinton has made this case basically from the primary on. Trump is unhinged, he’s a lunatic, he’s a crazy person, he’s a chaos candidate – sorry, wait, those are what the members of his party have said about him. My bad. Anyway, she’s called him unfit and unqualified and a million other things. But shockingly, none of them really stuck. She had to go further, she had to go bigger. She had to be – dare I say it – a touch more Trumpian.

The Basket of Deplorables is an incredibly calculated feint. It’s designed to look and feel like a gaffe because the media loves gaffes and gaffes are more fun to cover than the truth. But here’s where the realpolitik comes into play. We all know that some of Trump’s supporters are cavemen and monsters. Like the above joke, we’ve already decided those people exist within the Trump Tent. Now we’re just trying to determine the degree.

So there’s the first step of the process – the pearl-clutching and faux outrage, the how dare she? – but it’s immediately followed by the second part, which is: Not half! Maybe, like, a few. But half?! And now the debate isn’t about Hillary Clinton saying a mean thing; it’s about determining the specific threshold of truth to the mean thing she said.

Put another way: Hillary Clinton basically said Donald Trump eats lunch with a fleet of bridge trolls. And Trump, and Pence, and all of their surrogates now have to say “Look, there’s one bridge troll (David Duke), but we don’t like him.”

Now the conversation isn’t about Clinton, it’s about Trump, and Duke, and how far Trump’s affinity for bridge trolls extends. The simple fact is that it’s not one bridge troll. It’s all of the bridge trolls.

Trump can pretend Clinton called millions of people “deplorable” and “un-American,” but don’t forget one of his speakers at the GOP Convention thinks the franchise for women is when America started going downhill.

Trump can do outreach to African-American communities, but it was Milo that got banned from Twitter for going after an African-American actress.

Here’s a quote from Kellyanne Conway.

Here’s an article from Breitbart, the website Bannon ran until recently.

And Paul Manafort’s history of dictator-advising.

Here’s Corey Lewandowski assaulting a female reporter for Breitbart!

Trump can distance himself from the KKK all he wants, but he can’t distance himself from literally every campaign manager he’s employed thus far.

Clinton doesn’t want the bridge troll vote, any more than Trump wants the Latino or the African-American vote. That’s why this matters. Because there are people who deep down in their soul think Trump is a monster who has surrounded himself with monsters, but maybe they can reconcile that with some bullshit about lower taxes. Maybe they can hide behind the claims of political correctness that dog Democrats. Maybe they can believe that David Duke has a warped understanding of the Trump campaign.

Or they can face the reality. These are the people Hillary is talking to. She is making the case that supporting Trump gives tacit support to the white supremacists, to the racists, to the xenophobes, to the Islamophobes, to the misogynists. We know they’re there. Now we’re just trying to determine the degree. And if you vote for Trump, you have to accept the moral culpability that comes with that vote. Just because you’re not in the Basket of Deplorables doesn’t mean you’re not voting for that basket to have a whole fuck of a lot more power than it should ever have.

Clinton has a relatively hard base of support. So does Trump. This battle will be won and lost over the independents who dislike both of them and the Republicans who hate Trump but might just sell their soul and vote for him anyway. Clinton is no longer providing them cover. A vote for Trump is a vote for a candidate enthusiastically endorsed by the KKK. A man who surrounds himself with conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones. A man who turned first to a dictator whisperer and then to someone who has “given a platform to racists the alt-right.” A man who has the gall to say Clinton has criticized millions of Americans when his entire campaign is built around criticizing millions of Americans.

Square that with your conscience.

Hillary Clinton Gave a Press Conference

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton walks back to speak to reporters on her first flight on a new campaign plane before taking off at the Westchester County Airport in White Plains, N.Y., Monday, Sept. 5, 2016, to travel to Cleveland Hopkins International Airport for Labor Day events. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Some thoughts on one of the biggest non-stories of this election cycle.

For 275 days, Hillary Clinton declined to give a press conference. There are many reasons for her aversion to members of the media. They have spent the better part of three decades attacking her and her husband, looking for smoke where there wasn’t any, trying to turn smoke into fire by some kind of alchemy. Even now, there is a whole group of racist conspiracy theorizing websites masquerading as “news” organizations questioning her health (if you slow down a person laughing it looks like a seizure – try it!), her stamina, and a host of other things.

We like to live in this fantasy world where apparently press conferences are issued under oath with a truth serum. Fun fact – politicians can – and do – lie to the press. Ask anyone. Especially Trump, who lies pathologically and might not actually know what the definition of the word “truth” is. He took questions from the select group of press who made it to Mexico because they always have their passports. And he brazenly lied – he claimed the issue of the wall didn’t come up with the Mexican President when apparently that was literally how their discussion started. So…giving a press conference is not the same thing as transparency, or honesty. It’s just some kind of ritual rope-dance that we expect our politicians to do.

Let’s look at some context here, too. Due to a bunch of minor kerfuffles that daisy-chained themselves together, we now have access to tens of thousands of Clinton’s private emails. I mean, what do you want from a fucking press conference? Do you really think she’s going to be more honest in that forum? Less guarded? That someone who has been witch-hunted for most of her adult life is going to slip up? What’s the best-case scenario here, I’m asking honestly. Did people think a reporter would go “Madame Secetary about climate change – did you kill Vince Foster?” and she would be like “Great question, fucking right I did! Oh – no! I mean – back up!”

So beyond the fact that we have so much access to Clinton – 40 years of tax returns, thousands of private emails, multiple Congressional witch-hunts, and the list goes on – this thing, this fucking symbolic gesture mattered so much. What was she hiding? What didn’t she want us to know?

As it turns out, nothing. Or at least nothing that we now know that we didn’t previously. It was a symbolic gesture and it was exposed as such. The press is on her plane now, they asked, she answered, the world continues to rotate. You know why?

Hillary was – before a lifetime of public service – a very good attorney. As it turns out, they teach good classes at Yale Law School. She understands what she can say, what she can’t say, where the line is, and how to approach it without crossing it. Which goes back to my question: what did we expect from this? What shocking revelations did we expect from a careful, calculated, intelligent politician who has been under a microscope for 35 years?

The truth is: we didn’t. We didn’t expect anything and this was never going to change anything. The people who think she’s a murderous witch will now think she lied to the press just like she lied to the FBI and the Congressional hearings and her close personal friends and probably everyone she’s ever met. The people who think she has a healthy distrust of the press and is not given to total transparency because it’s burned her in the past will assume that she wasn’t caught off-guard and had her answers rehearsed.

And we will all move on. Because it was never a story, it was never news, it was just a sort-of idea. It’s like when we lose our shit over a President wearing or not wearing a US flag lapel pin. These aren’t things that matter and deep down, we all know better.

One candidate has released decades of tax returns. One candidate has released actual health records. One candidate has granted access to laypeople to their personal emails for us to pore over like a bunch of voyeuristic assholes. The other candidate has not. We have got to stop with this false equivalency.

A press conference – for a candidate who has lived in the public eye – changed nothing.

Tax returns, a real health record, anything approaching policy ideas – these are the fights we need to be having. It’s inexcusable for Trump to be this far out from a Presidential election and pretend the rules don’t apply, for him to chastise Clinton for a lack of transparency when he’s a brazen unapologetic liar who has failed the most basic qualifications for a Presidential candidate. We need to stop applying the rope dancing and the hoop jumping to one candidate exclusively.

Shame on anyone who plans to vote for Trump absent his full tax returns and an actual medical record. You are betraying the fundamental level of respect we expect our politicians to have for the office which they seek.

I would encourage any Trump supporter – if you really believe he’s qualified to be President – to pledge to withhold your vote and support until such time as he has done the very minimum expected of our candidates.

It’s not funny anymore, there’s no longer the bullshit “But press conferences!” excuse to cower behind. We have 2 months left.

It’s time Trump show a modicum of respect for the office he seeks. It’s time everyone – including his supporters – hold him to the same standard we apply to every other candidate.

Donald Trump is a Monster

I feel like the anti-Trump movement is fighting with one hand tied behind its back right now. We have to pretend this campaign is something that it isn’t; that it’s about white nationalism or the alt-right or fear or anxiety or whatever. We have to pretend that there’s even an iota of validity to what Trump is preaching, that calling it what it is would somehow debase our national dialog to an untenable level.

That ends now. At least for me.

I know facts don’t fucking matter to Donald Trump, so I won’t use them here. I won’t cite the fact that border patrol forces have more than tripled in the past 20 years, that net immigration is actually at zero or negative, that Obama has deported over 3 million violent criminals who were here illegally…because none of that matters to Trump or to his foaming-at-the-mouth acolytes. They feed off of pure, unadulterated, hatred of people that don’t look like them. He feeds their fate and he feeds off of it. He’s a wrestling heel at WWE Summer Slam and he’s running for President. So let me try a fucking emotional, fact-free appeal.

Donald Trump is a monster. Donald Trump doesn’t understand the idea of empathy, or sympathy. Donald Trump weaponizes grief again and again and again. Watching him parade the mothers of people who had been murdered, watching the audience cheer these victims, watching them whoop and holler when he sounds off a name that represents the White Victim of the Evil Brown Person, I got angry. I got livid with rage. And that’s the point, right? That Trump backs you into a corner where the only response is caveman, fight-or-flight, rage. Because once it short-circuits the part of your brain that says “Wait those things aren’t true” he makes a warped kind of sense. Once you just give in to the part of your brain that goes “Scary! Evil! Fight! Kill!” Trump is waiting at the other end. He is the fucking avatar of American anger. None of it makes sense, none of it is real, and that’s the point.

I want to talk to directly to Mr. Trump for a second. Donald, you’re a fucking insult to our political process. Every single vote you have received and will receive, every hat you sell, makes me cringe at the thought that this is the state of American democracy. You are a charlatan and an unabashed liar – as we’re reminded virtually daily by you and your staff of sycophants and conspiracy theorists. This isn’t about the future of America to you. It’s about winning. It’s about breaking into a club with 45 members. You don’t care if it’s bullshit, clearly. On some level, you understand that you would be a goddamned disaster of a President. It’s so clear every time you have to do something that isn’t leading a Klan rally masquerading as a Presidential campaign stop. I watched you in Mexico. You looked bored to tears. I mean, it must have hurt to listen to so much Spanish and to have to read remarks on paper. You don’t want to be President. You just want to win. And you are doing it in a way that is beyond dangerous. You are stoking fears and mainstreaming white supremacy. Not white nationalism. White. Fucking. Supremacy. At this point if I had to read your comments and David Duke’s back to back, it would be hard for me to tell which is which. You don’t want to talk about policy. You don’t want to talk about ideas. You want to yell and scream and be a petulant fucking child because I guess you weren’t hugged enough as a kid. What you have done – so far – is debilitating to our national dialogue and our political process. Every single day that you continue this farcical campaign, this white supremacist bullshit, this fearmongering and hate-spewing, is a bad day for America. Like, literally, you’re making the strongest argument ever against the founding principles of our country. Holy shit, man, if the founders saw you on the horizon they would have restricted democracy a fuck of a lot more than they already did.

You know how I know your game? Because I see the smug look of fucking satisfaction every time you parade a victim, a relative of a victim, of violent crime across your stage to peddle your fiction for you. In Donald Trump’s America, apparently, no one would ever die. Ever. You’d just end death. That’s the takeaway from what you did last night. This isn’t about immigration, you lying sack of shit. It’s about bullshit. People die, it’s an unavoidable fact of life. And again, I could point out that most of the people who commit mass shootings are, you know, white men (your core demographic), but that doesn’t matter to you or your voters because it’s true and it’s a fact and those are passé concepts in your dystopian hellscape of America.

It’s right there, in that look. “Fuck you, I win. Hahaha. Look at me. Look at me making these people say that I would have saved lives, that I would have that power, that I could stop bad things from ever happening. Vote for me because I will slay the monsters in your closet.” It wasn’t empathy, because you don’t understand empathy. It wasn’t pathos, because whatever part of the brain that allows pathos doesn’t exist for you. It was shameless, it was dirty, and it was a lie. And you enjoyed it.

I don’t know how utterly fucked your worldview must be to parade those people. “My son died, vote for Trump.” “My grandmother had her skull bashed in with a hammer, vote for Trump.” It’s fear, it’s anger, it’s nonsensical. Anne Coulter said she was going to play that speech to go to sleep at night. This isn’t okay. You’re not okay. You are taking advantage of victims to spew your racist, white supremacist, KKK-endorsed goddamned vitriol.

You have done enough damage to our national dialog. You have embarrassed this nation over and over and over and over. You are making a mockery of this country. You don’t want to make America great again, you deceitful, small-minded, bigoted shit. You want to make America yours and you don’t care who gets hurt along the way. Because you will always need a victim parade to scare people into voting for you.

What I watched last night wasn’t a Presidential rally. It was a KKK rally with hats for hoods. I don’t care if this seems vitriolic or hyperbolic. I’m tired of pretending we have to excuse your behavior as anything less than what it actually is.

Your voters are betraying the American ideals. Your voters are laughing at the Constitution. Your voters are voting to keep the evil brown people out.

You’re a goddamned disgrace, and I think I finally understand why you tweet at 2 or 3 or 4 in the morning. Because if I did a tenth of the monstrous things I witness on a daily basis, I couldn’t sleep either.

You know what you’re doing and you just don’t care.

I care. I care about this country and about moving forward and about empathy as a shared value.

Please drop out. Please admit that you don’t want this job, that you have never spent a single hour preparing to sit in the Oval Office. That you’re doing this because you can, consequences be damned. That every time someone dies from your policies, it’s another victim for you to hold up on stage like a goddamned prop.

It’s not alt-right, it’s not white nationalism, it’s not whatever cute term you want to use. Last night – moreso than any time in this campaign – you have made it clear that you are running a white supremacist campaign.

Shame on you, Mr. Trump.

Trump’s Idea Vortex Spins Ever Faster

Donald Trump has proven a lot of things we didn’t know, or weren’t willing to admit, about our electoral process. Like, for example, that ideology doesn’t matter a single iota to a plurality of voters. Because Trump has none. And that yelling really loudly and giving people nicknames is…an effective strategy.

But it’s so nice to see order returning to the political process and to see someone who has no idea what he’s doing flounder and grasp for a foothold in what increasingly looks like a death spiral. It restores some of my confidence in a process designed specifically to prevent the Donald Trumps of the world from becoming President.

First, hat’s off to new Trump campaign apologist Kellyanne Conway. If I close my eyes and don’t focus on reality, she says a lot of things that feel – down in my soul – like they might be true. Hillary is closed off! She doesn’t hold press conferences! We don’t know anything about her! She’s planning not to engage with the American people because she’s already ahead! Trump is debating ideas, Hillary is just attacking Trump!

Those ideas feel true, but they, um, they aren’t. Hillary has detailed her plans and policy proposals over and over and over. Hell, she’s been in the public eye for the better part of the last three decades. She’s been subjected to half a billion dollars’ worth of investigations. We are literally reading her private emails on a daily basis. Does she need to hold press conferences? Are we going to learn new information? Doubtful. And coming from a candidate who banned the Washington Post from his press pool, yeah, let’s talk about who closes off the press. Hillary has been debating ideas from the start. When she attacks Trump, it’s idea based: the idea that Donald Trump shouldn’t be near the Presidency. Also, Trump’s biggest idea so far is to unveil policy proposals “in the coming weeks.” He’s running out of weeks in which to do that. But this doesn’t matter in the idea vortex.

But that’s really at the heart of Trump’s campaign, and it always has been. This latest campaign reset/pivot/what-have-you is just slapping a new label on the snake oil. Trump understands that what he says doesn’t matter because people don’t like Clinton so they’ll believe whichever of his five hundred positions works for them. It’s brazen and it’s shameless, and it might have worked a few months ago. But when you get the free air time Trump has had, suddenly pretending you’re the friend of black voters…it falls on deaf ears. Trump’s campaign has always been a black hole of ideas, devoid of policy prescriptions, out of touch with reality, built around tweetable buzzwords and axioms like “Build the wall!” and “Mexico will pay for it!” and “We’re gonna win!” That’s barely a functional life ethos; it’s certainly not a governing philosophy for a country. It’s an idea vortex.

So his polls numbers sinking, his campaign in disarray, what did he do? He spun the vortex faster than ever. We’re going to enforce existing immigration laws, but also build the wall, and deport everyone, except just the bad ones, but no amnesty, but maybe a path forward out of the shadows, but also rapists and killers, but very great people, I mean look at the taco bowl, or the violent criminals. It’s misdirection on a scale that makes me actually dizzy. Because once ideas don’t matter, we’re voting on personality, and people don’t like Hillary Clinton. Once facts are gone, we’re voting on the ephemeral idea of an abstract President, and Trump feels like a better conception of a President. He feels honest, even as he’s lied brazenly and openly over and over and over and over and over. He apologized, sort of, publicly, without actually naming what he did wrong. Because he doesn’t know that he did anything wrong. Clinton is a trained lawyer and politician, and a very very good one. That’s why – even if she’s done all of the horrible shit people imagine – no one can pin anything on her. But that feels like she’s playing us. Trump feels genuine even as he’s simultaneously promising to soften his immigration stance and absolutely not soften his immigration stance. The idea vortex spins.

Clinton has armies of people crafting her policy proposals. Trump is just now getting briefed on why we can’t use the nuclear first strike. The Democratic primary was an idea-based primary between a moderated liberalism (as espoused by Clinton) and an aggressive version of Democratic Socialism (as espoused by Sanders). Those debates were frankly so in the weeds on policy I got bored. The GOP debates – with the bizarre exceptions of Rubio’s Gang of 8 legislation and the numbers of H-1B visas – was a children’s pissing contest where the size of Donald Trump’s penis was actually discussed on stage. But Kellyanne only wants to talk about ideas. I look forward to her pulling them from the depths of the swirling, undulating maelstrom that is Donald Trump’s demagoguery.

Don’t worry, though. Whatever version of Donald Trump you want, that’s the version he is. He has, at some point, taken a stance on everything that you agree with. We’re dropping out of NATO (or not), he’s pro-choice (or not), he wants to tax the wealthy (or not), he’s anti-free trade (or not), he loves women (or not), he’s not racist (or he is), he loves Hispanics (except all of the murderers), he’ll soften his stance (but keep the wall). His ideas are to be determined! Trust him! In the next 75 days he will definitely take a solid stance on everything (or not). Because that’s the truth at the heart of Donald Trump’s candidacy: be all things to all people and let them vote for whatever idea they like best. Because the truth is he has no fixed ideology, no firm positions. And once you forget that, you can just vote against Hillary Clinton because boooooo she’s evil. Or whatever.

Welcome to the idea vortex, the gaping maw of Trump’s campaign. Try not to get lost – it’s dangerous here.

BREAKING: Noted Famous Person Bono Has Huma Abedin’s Email Address

Also, water is wet.

In the interest of fairness, I’m going to start with some honesty: I fully believe that if I had a giant multinational nonprofit organization and I had a hundred million dollars, I would probably launder some of my personal wealth through said organization. I mean, why not, right? I would also make sure that I didn’t get caught doing it. So do the Clintons do some things that might be illegal through their foundation? My guess is probably. Are two people that intelligent and well-versed in the law ever going to get caught for it? Hahahaha. No, no they aren’t.

In case you missed it, or in case you stopped caring that one of our political parties is trying to turn fog into smoke and prove that San Francisco is actually on fire, here’s a quick recap. A conservative activist group called Judicial Watch (because these people love Orwellian names) decided to do an FOIA request on Clinton’s emails – those that were released as well as another fifteen thousand that weren’t. The latest theory is so-called “pay to play” – that Clinton was trading favors as Secretary of State in exchange for contributions to her charity organization. In reality, what we’ve learned is:

• Rich people know other rich people.
• Hillary populated both the State Department and her foundation with people she liked and trusted.
• Those people occasionally emailed.
• Rich people would ask the Foundation to email the Secretary’s staff on their behalf in addition to going through official channels.
• People who contributed to the charity organization also talked to the State Department.
• These people included the Crown Prince of Bahrain, Bono, and the CEO of SlimFast.
• Bono wanted to broadcast to the International Space Station because he’s Bono.
• A sports executive once asked for a favor on behalf of a soccer player with a criminal past.
• That favor was not granted.

Now, obviously, there are still like 14870 emails to sift through, but my God is this what we’re clutching our pearls over? That Bono emailed one Clinton aide at one Clinton organization instead of another Clinton aide at the Clinton State Department? How dare he! He wanted to – to – I can barely bring myself to say it – broadcast to the ISS! Talk about pay to play.

One of the other things that gets wrapped up in all of this is Bahrain’s history of human rights abuses. Again, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the US has lots of friendly relations with strategically important countries (Turkey) who have issues with democracy (Saudi Arabia) and the like. We try to shy away from, say, the Kim Jong-Un’s of the world, but diplomacy is messy. Like that time we backed Saddam Hussein! Or the time we armed al-Qaeda (oops). Or the time we toppled Saddam Hussein and let ISIS fill the void (dammit). The history of the United States is littered with examples of propping up people who matter to us with a less-than-stellar track record on any number of abuses or rights violations.

Regardless, the Crown Prince of Bahrain is an important person who can get an audience with the Secretary. His 32 million dollar scholarship fund didn’t secure him that audience. Being the Crown Prince of Bahrain did.

My guess – and I’m speculating – is that Bono had a business card from one of the charity functions where he was trying to end fucking AIDS in Africa and thought “Oh, hey, I bet my dude Doug can pass along a request.” Would it have been better for Bono to, I guess, Google the State Department main line, call an operator, say “Hi I’m fucking Bono and I’d like to speak to Huma.” Sure. Do I blame him for not doing that? I don’t.

Politics is dirty, rich people are above the law, and I think once you hit, like, a hundred million dollars, you just get the little black book of famous people’s information. When I found out that Kanye had Taylor Swift’s phone number I didn’t decide to launch an FOIA request to figure out why. I just assume the people in those circles far, far above mine occasionally meet and hang out.

As usual, these emails confirm what people want to be true. If Clinton did actually engage in pay-to-play, I promise you she wouldn’t have an email saying “I’ll trade you an ambassadorship for a million dollar donation.” She’s a Yale-educated lawyer. She understands better than you, or me, or the pitchfork mob that calls itself Judicial Watch, what discoverable evidence is. Even if you believe she did all of the evil things of which she’s accused, there’s a reason no one can prove it.

By the way, did you know Donald Trump has the Donald J Trump Foundation? It’s a 501(c)3 nonprofit, and it receives and disburses money. That’s literally all I know about it. There’s a blank splash page for the Donald J Trump Foundation for Veterans. And there are a handful of tax filings.

But for a candidate who hasn’t released his personal taxes (Clinton has, and they go back to the 70s because of all the various offices she and her husband have run for), who hasn’t released a real health report (“all of the tests came back positive!” is about all we have, and the assertion that he will be the healthiest President in US history), who has a completely opaque charity, who promised his wife would address allegations that she abused a tourist visa while working in the US but who still hasn’t proven she didn’t, whose until-last-week campaign manager literally received off-the-books payments from a Ukrainian political party in exchange for DC lobbying efforts that were legally required to be reported to the government but weren’t – for that individual to call for a special prosecutor, an immediate investigation, and whatever words he thinks sound like a thing a President should say…well it’s the height of hypocrisy and the height of irony. But I’m not sure if either of those count among “the best words” that Donald Trump uses or understands.

Stop pretending that a charity foundation is SPECTRE, okay? And also, shame on anyone who still feels comfortable voting for the least transparent candidate in modern US history.

By the way, with 77 days until the election, we still don’t know Trump’s actual policies – on basically anything. He re-released his tax policy, which was stolen from Paul Ryan. He’s still working through his immigration policy, his domestic policy, his international policy, basically every policy other than “electing Donald Trump.” Jesus, can we talk about any of that? Or do we need to keep focusing on what Bono told Huma over fucking appetizers?

Pour A Shot of Vodka Out For the Fallen Comrade

I’m gonna miss Paul Manafort and I don’t even mean that ironically. Before we get to the Russian-owned political operative, my preamble catch-up on why Trump isn’t actually a candidate that we should take seriously:

He won’t release his tax returns, his health report was a work of fiction, he’s yet to agree to the debates, he called John McCain a loser for getting captured, he’s threatened to revenge-murder terrorist families, he’s threatened to not enforce Article 5 of the NATO treaty, he’s threatened to withdraw our troops from South Korea earning the praise of Kim Jong-Un, he has a man-crash on Vladimir Putin, he encouraged Russia to hack into our former Secretary of State’s emails to score political points, he wants to fuck his daughter, he described his other daughter at the age of one as basically a set of tits and legs, he’s threatened tariffs on China that would lead to a trade war, he’s encouraged violence repeatedly at his rallies, his entire convention was an open-arms embrace of fascist ideology, he’s a pathological liar, he doesn’t actually understand how government works, he has threatened to undermine the 1st, 4th, 5th, 8th, and 14th Amendments to the Constitution, and his campaign was until recently being run by an off-duty Bond villain.

Now onto my dude Paul. There was something fun about this guy who didn’t just hobby in dictators, he built a career out of them. So this guy showed up and was like “Nationalist, racist, populism? Yeah I can make this palatable.” And even he couldn’t contain the monster that is Donald Trump’s ego and his unfiltered id. Let that sink in: he got strongman dictators elected popularly in Ukraine and elsewhere. He personally got the US to fund the Angolan civil war at a tremendous cost of life. This guy couldn’t wrangle Donald Trump? Are you kidding?

I always felt that if Trump really wanted to win, Manafort could have delivered this election for him. Trump resisted all of Manafort’s ideas and now he’s forced him out. This feels like the death knell to the campaign, and I’m still trying to wrap my head around the events of the past month or so.

The Trump campaign seems to be at war with itself. Manafort was the guy trying to rein Trump in and professionalize the campaign. So on the same night, Trump gives a speech expressing — contrition? — and also shitcans the guy who’d been begging him to do that. None of it makes sense. It feels like every week the situation gets more dire and Trump smashes a badly-damaged RESET button (or PIVOT button, or both).

To wit: the latest reports are that his latest reset last night was orchestrated by new campaign manager KellyAnne Conway. A softer, more humanized Donald. A Donald that can appeal to women and people of color, to the demographics he has scorched all of the Earth around.

But then he also hired — as the somewhat bizarre “campaign CEO” — Stephen Bannon, who runs the “alt-right” website Breitbart. I guess we call it “alt-right” because we have to pretend it’s something more than fever dream bullshit? So the Bannon hire seemed to double down on the racism and xenophobia that got Trump through the primary.

So at the same time he fires the person who was trying to moderate him, hires two people who have diametrically opposed ideas — one who will double down on the conspiracy theorizing and, frankly, bullshit, and one who will present the softer, more Presidential Donald to the world.

Trump has always kind of relied on this dichotomy: quoting Roger Stone out of one side of his mouth and chastising his primary opponents for a lack of decorum. It’s gotten so bad that CNN has started fact-checking Trump in their own chyrons (on-screen graphics). So I guess after flirting with the Lewandowski style — brash, unapologetic, arena touring — and then the Manafort style — quieter, reserved, Presidential — Trump decided to have his cake and eat it too. Now it seems Bannon will be in charge of the part of the campaign that nods and winks to white supremacists and the “alt-right” and Conway will be in charge of the campaign that decries Hillary Clinton as a bigot without a shred of irony. It is brazenly transparent, but Trump isn’t going after high-information voters. It’s just hard to imagine that this close to the election — 80-odd days — Trump is going to be able to undo the year plus of free media attention focusing on the straight talk racism. The reset button isn’t broken yet but he’s running out of uses quickly.

Manafort could have won this thing with his eyes closed. Dictators are his wheelhouse. Conway and Bannon demonstrate that there are two Donald Trump campaigns with fundamentally opposite ideas about how to win. I don’t see a world in which Trump can wrestle those two things into anything approaching a coherent campaign and a coherent vision.

Buckle up, it’s only getting weirder.

And pour out some of the good shit for the fallen comrade.

This Election is a Frightening Echo of 2000

Ahh, simpler times. Remember when the crazy cowboy running for the GOP nomination had at least held elected office? George W Bush looks like a dream compared to Donald Trump. But if Hillary Clinton doesn’t learn from the mistakes of the year 2000, she’s destined to repeat them. Am I seriously the only person getting this?

I know it’s fashionable to talk about how this election is just 1968 all over again – the violence, the racism, the parties splitting apart at the seams – and that’s all totally valid. But we don’t have to cast our gaze so far back to before half the current voters were born (note: approximate number, I think). We just have to look at the year 2000. Also, that’s a very bad thing for Hillary Clinton.

On the Democratic side, you have Hillary Clinton – a well-qualified, highly intelligent person. She’s also a notorious policy wonk who would be more at home debating the intricacies of marginal tax rates than she would kissing babies. She’s intellectual but can appear cold and calculating, disengaged. Further, she served in a key role of the current Administration. The current administration is a Democratic President finishing his second term. The current President is a bit more charming, charismatic, and engaged than the person carrying his mantle. The candidate in this election is running on a continuation of the policies of the current President.

On the other side, we have a loud, brash candidate who doesn’t seem especially well prepared for the office of the Presidency. His campaign felt like a bit of a joke until he beat the more qualified, better prepared candidates. He has a candor and a seeming honesty to him that appeals to a lot of people. Despite being fabulously wealthy, he feels like a man of the people. He has a refreshing, shoot from the hip style. Not the most polished, but you feel like that gut instinct works for him.

People: this is Bush/Gore 2000. How much clearer can it be? Obviously it’s not exactly the same, but these parallels are really, really strong. I mean, even Paul Manaforte is friends with Karl Rove! While John Podesta didn’t work for Gore, he was in the Clinton administration in a big role.

Clinton fans think this is their election to lose. I get the issues with Trump – I personally despise what he represents as a candidate (I would criticize him as a person but I don’t rightly know if he has the higher brain function worthy of the term) – but this isn’t open and shut. It’s not even close.

Bush was also a fun, friendly, face for his campaign. He also had incredibly talented people – Karl Rove – running it behind the scenes. I still don’t know that Bush is even in Gore’s intellectual class, and yet I feel like Bush won all of the debates? Trump actually won virtually all of his debates. Trump beat Ted Cruz who’s basically a computer algorithm to win debates given human form!

Clinton and her fans exist in a weird sort of echo chamber. They’re self-congratulatory and back-slapping every time she gives a speech – most notably her foreign policy speech – about how stupid Trump is and how unfit. Guess what? That’s not turning Trump people around. Clinton is surrounded by intellectuals – even in her electorate – and not normal people. Trump, for better or worse, speaks the language of the people. He’s on Twitter, he’s probably googling himself right now (Hi Future Supreme Leader!)

There’s that great quote about people who don’t learn from history. You know the one. What’s interesting is that Clinton has learned from the past – a lot of her foreign policy stems from the perceived mistakes of her husband. Her whole campaign structure has been (mostly) ripping off Obama’s staff and Obama’s tactics from his successful 2008 campaign – the irony of course being that Obama ran to beat Clinton and Clinton ran Obama’s campaign to beat Sanders, which, uh, didn’t work as well as she probably hoped.

The verdict is out on how much the Bernie or Bust movement could prove a Ralph Nader-like spoiler – the truth is the Libertarians look more likely to play spoiler to Trump. It’s possible that this will be like 08 and the Bernie movement will line up behind Clinton. It’s also possible that they cost her the election.

But even without factoring that in, it feels very much like her strengths are Gore’s strengths, Trump’s strengths are Bush’s strengths, and there are just way too many parallels to make me feel comfortable. Mostly because, as I’ve written elsewhere, Trump is the closest thing to an actual fascist we’ve had in modern times. He’s much more dangerous than Bush and his warmongering neoconservative administration.

Of course, people will also counter that Hillary Clinton has to battle misogyny, that America is scared of a female President. That’s true and that makes this even worse. Al Gore lost/drew/was screwed by Antonin Scalia without having to overcome institutional misogyny. Now we have a similar candidate with a bigger challenge (to say nothing of institutional character assassination for 3 deacdes).

It’s generally hard for a party to win three consecutive terms in the White House. It’s just how American politics works. So there’s also that disadvantage that both Clinton and Gore ran into.

It’s so easy from inside the ivory tower to pretend that Trump is too scary, too unstable, that America is too intelligent for that. It basically means unthinking everything, taking a totally new approach. But all of these things were true in 2000.

Clinton has to figure out – and fast – how to overcome Gore’s struggles and find better attacks on Trump than Gore found. That race was too close (obviously) for comfort. This race could be closer. Or it could flip the other way. Clinton’s unfavorable are sky high, but so are Trump’s. Bush had the advantage of two decades of grooming under Karl Rove. Trump is still in his first 12 months as a professional politician and we let him get this far. Six more months under Paul Manafort and he might start to look, if not Presidential, not like the worst idea ever. When people are already resigned to choosing the lesser of two evils, Trump doesn’t have to become a hero. He just has to inch past Hillary in the scale of who’s perceived worse. That’s not a huge jump to make.

I hope I’m wrong. I used to think that this was going to be Hillary’s by a hundred electoral votes. Then the GOP swallowed any sense of principle and lined up behind their candidate. Clinton was disliked from day one, and so far she’s doing more red meat than trying to attract Trump voters. Trump, meanwhile, is actively courting disaffected Democrats. The Democratic Party is being its typical disorganized self, trying to lose an election they should pretty easily win.

I can’t stress enough that this feels like 2000 all over again and thinking that the better-qualified intellectual candidate who will continue the policies that served us well for eight years is exactly how Democrats lost last time (and Ralph Nader!). That was with a likable if aloof candidate. Trump isn’t as stupid, as easily dismissed, as people think. Ask literally sixteen Republicans who lost to him.

Clinton will lose this if she doesn’t figure out how to win in a hurry. She and her team need to be reviewing everything that happened in 2000. It won’t do everything – Trump is unlike Bush or any candidate really in history – but it will help. She can’t repeat Gore’s mistakes. Liberals can’t keep laughing off the threat of Trump until he’s in the White House.

It’s going to be a scary six months.

For Donald Trump, Fascism is a Feature not a Bug

I know we all like to laugh and joke about how Trump doesn’t have any actual policy positions, and compare him to Hitler, etc. In the past week he has been hailed by child tyrant Kim Jong Un for his far-sighted vision. MSNBC reported just yesterday that Trump became friends with an Italian politician who wears a black shirt to his rallies to invoke the ghost of Mussolini.

But the more I look at him the more obvious one thing becomes: Donald Trump isn’t flirting with authoritarianism. Rather, I’d argue his entire life has been rooted in the dictates of it. This isn’t a new phenomenon: this is what has influenced his entire political and personal ethos.

It would be easy to talk about how his father was a German immigrant who didn’t show Trump enough love (according to biographers) and mostly taught him the value of strength and power. How even in this you see the Machiavellian underpinnings of valuing fear over love as an emotion. But that’s juvenile, it’s Freudian, and it’s mostly irrelevant. Let’s talk about – in order – Trump’s mentor, his closest advisor, and his newest campaign guru. When we’re done, I believe I will have made the case that Trump has always been a fascist, he’s just now becoming a politician.

First up is Roy Cohn. For those who don’t know – or only know him from Angels in America – Roy Cohn had a…storied career as an attorney. As a young man, he worked directly under one Joseph McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities. That’s right: one of his first major forays into politics was accusing people of being Communist spies and trying to have them arrested. I know the Cold War was a scary time, but we can all agree that this was fearmongering and political censorship, right? Are there people out there who still think Joe McCarthy was fighting the good fight? Anyway, after leaving McCarthy, Cohn moved to New York where he became the lawyer for the Genovese crime family. In fact, a lot of meetings of the Five Families are alleged to have happened inside Roy Cohn’s office because the FBI couldn’t bug him without violating privilege. Suffice it to say, Fat Tony Salerno wasn’t the worst person of Roy Cohn’s references. Another one of Cohn’s clients was Donald Trump. When Trump was accused of discriminatory housing practices, he hired Cohn. Cohn was a bulldog who fought tooth and nail – he even accused the FBI (somewhat ironically) of employing “Gestapo tactics.” In Cohn, we find a lot of Trump’s father and a lot of Trump: never back down, attack your enemies, never admit shortcomings. Always negotiate from strength.

Next up is Roger Stone! Roger Stone was considered one of the masters of the political dark arts alongside other luminaries like Lee Atwater. Stone is now a retired lawyer in New York, but he remains one of Trump’s closest friends. When Stone was 19, he infamously donated money to Richard Nixon’s primary opponent in the name of the Young Socialist Alliance and leaked the donation to the press. Stone approaches dirty politicking with a relish and zeal mostly reserved for professional athletes. Guess who introduced him to Donald Trump? Roy Cohn. Remember that time that Trump suggested that Ted Cruz’s father murdered JFK? Yeah, Roger Stone was involved. The time that Cruz allegedly had affairs with six women? They couldn’t link it to Stone, but Cruz accused Stone of being behind the allegation. To be fair to him, dirty politicking isn’t fascist. Idolizing Richard Nixon – and getting a back tattoo of him – is a bit more questionable. Either way, the dirty politics of Stone border on the kind of thing we see with a lot of dictators. It’s discrediting opponents instead of killing them, but America does still have some laws. I could also discuss the legendary status of Roger Stone’s lobbying firm… and I intend to!

Last up we have Paul Manafort. Paul Manafort is from a nearly bygone era of political operatives – he’s contemporaries with Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. Slate, Reuters, and I have all written extensively about Paul Manafort, but the highlights are worth revisiting. Manafort (and Roger Stone) spent the better part of two decades rehabbing dictators who had fallen out of favor. He extended at least one civil war, he convinced Congress to finance warlords. He once disappeared for three weeks as the result of a deal gone awry with Vladimir Putin’s stooge in the Ukraine, a guy he supported while Putin was poisoning his opponent. Manafort’s firm earned the nickname “The Torturer’s Lobby.” It was a running joke in DC that if you asked him about a warlord, he’d tell you who had the account.

So Trump learned from Roy Cohn, befriended Roger Stone, and then hired Paul Manafort. If this feels like a guy who just idly dreams about having a private army to deport Mexicans, a guy who wouldn’t accuse his opponents of murdering a President, a guy whose threat to “open up the libel laws” is idle…look at his history. Trump isn’t flirting with fascism. It’s the closest thing he’s ever had to an ethos and he has surrounded himself with the kinds of people who think rolling back Democracy isn’t the worst idea. His mentor, his advisor, his de facto campaign manager. From the time he was a young man Trump has believed in absolute strength and achieving it my whatever means necessary.

Machiavelli famously said “It is better to be feared than loved if one cannot be both.” A look at the polls show Trump isn’t loved. If he wins, he’s going to rely on fear.

And, unlike most everything else in this campaign, our fear is something he absolutely deserves.

PC Culture and the Rise of Trump

First I want to start with some definitional stuff because otherwise this will get way too heady. When those of us who follow politics talk about the “culture wars” we’re speaking broadly about social policy in the United States and how quickly they’ve progressed. Civil Rights in the 60s all the way to the modern push for Civil Rights. This is a battle that – despite what you might hear in the liberal echo chamber – the left has almost exclusively won. Imagine being someone opposed to marriage equality / generally averse to change. Twelve years ago, there were statewide and national pushes for a Constitutional Amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman. Now, the Supreme Court has ruled that marriage equality is protected by the Constitution, making it the law of the land. That’s a huge shift in the US policy and a relatively rapid one. Three or four years ago, trans rights weren’t really a thing you heard about – at all. Now Loretta Lynch is advocating trans rights alongside all over civil rights.

Do me a favor when you imagine the above – try and remove your personal bias. I’m sure you’re probably the most progressive person alive, but a lot of Americans aren’t. They fear change and they fear ceding ground to people they don’t identify with or understand. This is why there are culture wars to begin with.

None of this is meant to excuse outright bigotry or racism or sexism. The Supreme Court also gutted the Voting Rights Act in one of the biggest blows against the Civil Rights movement. But on the whole, the ledger comes out in favor of progress and equality at a dizzying pace in the last ten years.

But a key part of winning these types of battles is knowing where to draw the line, and the left has gotten pretty content with winning every battle. They’re now pushing the battle lines just a little bit too far. It’s not exactly tyranny of the majority, but it’s close enough. Once the lines are pushed too far, there will be a brutal snapback, and we’re already experiencing it with Trump.

There are almost two definitions of PC culture. On the left it’s a culture of checking privilege and not being bigoted. On the right it’s demonizing privilege and all those who had it and using it to thought police people with different opinions. The left is pushing the advantage too far and making the right feel victimized. Trump is, for a lot of them, the savior of their people.

Again, it’s difficult to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand their point of view, but it’s critical to do exactly that. Look – I’m a socially progressive white male. I was born into the upper middle class and got a college degree. I’m about as privileged as you’re allowed to be in this country without being a legacy at Harvard. I cannot conceive of a world where I’m not privileged.

But I understand that other people feel this way. Because the left has a bad habit of taking moral superiority and condescending to anyone who disagrees with them – on anything. This is where it’s pushing the boundaries of the conversation too far. Generally speaking, dealing in absolutes is incredibly dangerous. Once we start pretending differences of opinion are factually inaccurate, it foments the kind of polarization and division we’re seeing take over this political process. It also makes it easy for someone like Trump to come to power.

Part of this is the nature of the two-party system. It makes it way too easy to conflate ideologies that are often separate. Not every Republican or conservative believes in outdated definitions of marriage. It’s just so easy to assume that anyone who believes in limited government is secretly also a bigot. When we jump to those conclusions and conflate those definitions, it makes them feel victimized. When we shout down people who disagree with us, it makes them feel like they aren’t heard.

Even within liberal circles there are so many ideological purity conversations. This contentious primary has proven that. It feels like sometimes as a man you have to preface everything you say with a disclaimer about how you have checked your privilege, and it’s not because you’re being sexist, but you respect someone’s opinion to believe that there’s institutional misogyny at work…it can be exhausting. And that’s when you’re mostly in agreement with someone! Imagine being on the other side. Imagine having every point you make being shot down with “Check your privilege” or “That requires a trigger warning!”

For fuck’s sake, there were students who asked their university to find the “vandals” who wrote Trump 2016 in chalk because it caused them a traumatic experience. That is thought policing. That is the thing we cannot do in a free and open society. Political free speech is protected, no matter how vile the candidate. Once we start prosecuting people for supporting ideas with which we disagree, it becomes very easy to prosecute anyone for anything. Similarly – and President Obama talked about this – university students got Condoleeza Rice – a political pioneer who, as an African-American woman, rose to the highest levels of government (in a conservative administration!) – disinvited from their commencement speech. Once we live in a world where the only right ideas are the ones you have and anyone who challenges them is morally wrong, we’ve created a groupthink culture that undermines Democracy.

We have to find the line and we have to uncross it. It makes my fucking skin crawl to defend people who support Donald Trump. I believe he’s unqualified for the office, has a temperament that could lead to global catastrophe, and has an authoritarian bent that could actually roll back Democratic institutions. But if I don’t acknowledge the validity of the claims of his supporters, if I treat them as inherently morally wrong on every issue, then we all lose. We can’t advocate a free and open society rooted in the idea that liberalism is the be-all and end-all philosophy.

Once we create the thought police – even if it’s just shouting people down in conversation – we’re creating the same Orwellian nightmare that we worry Trump will usher in.

So please, please, can we keep the discourse open and rational and a little less polarized? Liberals won the culture wars. That doesn’t mean there aren’t new battles to fight – there are and there will continue to be, but accusing anyone who disagrees with you of being somehow sub-human, or backwards, or stupid…this turns them into victims and it causes them to look for a champion.

Let’s be a little more civil and a little more democratic. Please?

Bernie or Bust and the Appeal of Arson

Hi Bernie fans! It’s Chris (waves arms). For those of you who don’t know about me, I’m a relatively independent voter whose views currently align a lot more with the Democratic Party. I wouldn’t say I’m a diehard liberal – although some people might – but I just really dislike where the GOP is currently. Anyway, about a year going into this election cycle (which are interminably long), I looked at my options. The GOP was mostly a clown car and Hillary Clinton was not super exciting to me. I’m sure you can guess why – I don’t like dynastic politics (even self-made dynasties), I find her extremely equivocating (as was her husband!) and hard to pin down on specific policies, etc. It had nothing to do with her being a woman – she’s the most successful female politician ever! She really is! It’s awesome how many glass ceilings she’s shattered. If Bill Clinton were running I’d probably dislike him too! Anyway, I felt that Clinton’s approach to the next Presidency would be too incrementalist, too centrist. I wanted someone willing to break some furniture, get real messy in the White House. So about a year ago, Bernie Sanders declared.

I did my due diligence and I found I really liked him! He provided clearer differences with existing orthodoxy than did Clinton, and he was running without the aid of mega donors and wanted to end Citizens United. From the time this guy declared, I was like “Yeah, Bernie! This is something I can get behind.” I remember when Sanders was a fringe candidate 70 points behind in the polls, when no one knew his name. I’ve been leading the fight for Bernie since day one. He’s my dude. I promise. Having said all of that, I have a really humble request to the Bernie or Bust movement:

Shut the fuck up. I know that’ll sound mean and condescending and probably like one of those stupid Establishment Hillary types, so let your blood pressure go up, get nice and angry, take a deep breath, and then read what I’m about to write:

Shut the actual fuck up. I swear to fucking God if you people help get Trump elected, you are each and every one of you dead to me. I’m really happy that for the first time (probably) in your life you’ve found a politician who speaks to you. That’s great. The level of engagement with Sanders people is sky high. That’s awesome, welcome to being an actual part of the process by which we determine who leads the free world. Please stick around, it’s actually super beneficial to have an informed electorate and you will get SO MANY CHANCES to vote! We vote like all the time here.

And you did! A lot of you! So many people voted for Bernie! He won a bunch of states! He’ll probably win some more! He has demonstrated unequivocally that the party itself has shifted to the left of Clinton and Obama’s policies. He has engaged a generation of people who were apathetic. I cannot say enough good things about what Bernie Sanders has done to our political discourse.

But he lost. He didn’t have the nomination stolen from him, there wasn’t a nefarious plot afoot to disenfranchise every Bernie voter. Do you know how difficult that would be? Looking at voter rolls and eliminating the Sanders people? He hasn’t run before! How would they know who to disenfranchise? Our government can’t do anything right and you’re willing to ascribe to the same DNC you think is horrifically run that level of aptitude? Are you fucking kidding? Clinton has – at current time – three million more votes. If you add up all of the perceived voter fraud in all the towns in all the world, you’re not overcoming that gap.

But the superdelegates! The superdelegates did what they’re designed to do: they stopped an independent who has spent his career fucking over the Democratic Party from hijacking their party. It’s a little undemocratic! Welcome to politics, we’re very happy you decided to wake up. You know the primary process is new, right? Like, party politics aren’t democratic. At all. Until recently the party bosses just sat in a room and picked. And you know who they pick? The registered-before-last-year Democrat. The one who worked the party infrastructure. If you think that’s patently unfair, maybe just stop following politics because all of your rainbow and unicorn dreams are about to get smashed into little tiny pieces.

I get that you’re upset and you feel cheated and hard done by. Hell, in another election cycle I might even tell you to protest vote your conscience, why not? You want to send a message, man, to the system, that it’s broken, you want a revolution! That’s awesome.

But Donald Trump threatens – and I mean this sincerely – the institution of Democracy. No, no no. Hear me out: when we talk about this election we talk about the choice between someone you might find unpalatable or dishonest or whatever the fuck. But her opponent is someone who has promised to deport 12 million people. You know what that requires? An army. An actual army breaking down doors and rounding up illegals. This is how tyranny starts. Because once Trump has his Gestapo, he does not have to stop with illegal immigrants. Hell, he doesn’t have to stop period. You know what else Trump has threatened to do? “Open up these libel laws.” That means he wants to shift the definition of what a newspaper can and can’t publish from “lies” to “things I don’t like.” This is subverting the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. This is an aggressive assault on the idea of American Democracy.

Grow the ever living fuck up and understand that’s not okay. I’m upset this even warrants explanation. But when your choice is between a career politician (who, by the way, is so qualified it’s depressing to me) and a guy who is reading out of the Mussolini playbook, you forfeit the option to protest vote against Clinton.

Do you want tyranny? Do you want wide scale economic collapse? Do you want the Gestapo? I mean, what the hell guys?

The stakes of this election are exceedingly clear, and if you somehow have the gall to tell me that it’s worth a few years of tyranny so that the pendulum can swing back to your happy place on Bernie Island, then I take back what I said about being glad you’re in the process. Because nihilism and bullshit is not how we should determine the leader of the free world.

I want to reiterate, here, for those of you still with me, that I preferred Sanders. But he lost. This is how democracy works. When you decide that democracy works however you want it to work, that’s tyranny. That’s when you become Trump. Sanders shifted the conversation and had a material impact on Clinton and came really really close to winning. He’s gotten a huge mouthpiece and he’ll now suddenly be a Progressive leader in the Senate.

But the fact that you’re so upset over this loss that you’re willing to watch Trump burn down American Democracy is not okay. Our country has problems, for sure, and maybe some of them won’t get fixed under Clinton. But she won’t run roughshod over actual American Democracy.

Grow up. Your ideological purity is not going to keep you warm in Donald Trump’s political prisoner camps. And if you think for a goddamned second I’m being too severe, look up his mentors, his advisors, his idols. Roy Cohn – Joe McCarthy’s right hand man during the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearing. Paul Manafort – the dude who backed Vladimir Putin’s strongman dictator puppet in the Ukraine when Putin tried to murder his opponent in the Orange Revolution. I know our dialog gets intense, tempers flare, and language gets hyperbolic. I know it does. Look these people up. Trump isn’t flirting with authoritarianism – Trump has a lifelong tradition with silencing dissidents and authoritarian tactics. This should scare you. It should terrify you.

I’m not asking you to fall in love with Hillary Clinton. You’re not looking for a life partner, you’re looking for a commander in chief. And if you like American Democracy as an institution, vote for the person who can defeat Trump. I don’t care how many shit fits you feel the need to throw to soothe your bruised ego because you were wrong and she was right and it makes you mad. I don’t care. And I’m saying this as someone who fought the Bernie fight as long and as hard as I could.

It’s over and the thing on the horizon is actually bad. Really, really bad. Swallow your pride, vote for Clinton, because we cannot let Trump win. I’m done. I’m done with your conspiracies, I’m done with your bullshit, I’m done with you actually undermining the last bulwark against tyranny in the United States. I beat the drum harder than any of you when Sanders had a shot. Now he doesn’t and we need to fight the next fight. You might not like Hillary, but in the face of Trump your preferences can take a backseat to the country and the survival of our Republic

So please, just shut the fuck up.