Blog Overview (Permanent Top Post)

This blog explores politics from a liberal/left perspective but also deals heavily with conspiracy theories and various unusual topics. Although I started this blog to research 9/11, my most pressing issue of concern now is anthropogenic climate change.

If you have doubts about the science of climate change, this website is a very useful resource to get educated.

I'm happy to have people comment and contribute ideas here. I don't censor comments except in rare cases where there is abuse or private information. Google/Blogger does sometimes censor comments for reasons I don't understand and I have no control over. Lately, I am not able to even find comments that Google/Blogger has blocked. Sorry about that.

I post kind of irregularly in recent years but I try to keep this site active. Feel free to use the search engine on the side for older content. You can read about the history of this blog here.

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Thank you for reading.

Downfall of the American Republic

This is a long but quite good piece from Andrew Sullivan (who I normally despise), reviewing the rise and fall of the Roman empire and then US politics over the past 100 years or so.

Key bit here:

It does seem clear we no longer liven a truly free society, and certainly we're living in a major dystopia...

Jeffrey Epstein Suicided

Who to blame? Trump, Clinton or someone else?

Trump tweeted this:

Worth remembering this fairly damning video:

Also-- this is fucking nuts:

BARR visited the EPSTEIN jail? "When does that happen? Atty Gen never visits jails."

Both Sides To Blame for Mass Shootings?

Human pimple Marc Thiessen tries to make a case for how the El Paso shooting had nothing to do with Trump, but if it did, then by god, the Dayton shooting that followed soon after, was the fault of leftists.

The El Paso shooter WAS clearly inspired by Trump, in that he referenced Trump's same anti-immigrant language in his white supremacist manifesto. He shot Hispanics in Texas, clearly in a place where Mexican immigrants were often found.

There is no doubt Trump has ramped up the hate against immigrants and emboldened murderous white supremacists.

The Dayton shooter on the other hand, had no clear political motive for his act of murder. He killed random people in Dayton. He seemed to have clear lefty leanings, but he was a bit of crazy mess overall.

Importantly, the Dayton shooting happened very soon after the El Paso shooting-- the same night, and immediately gave Trump supporters a nice distraction and "whataboutism". Hard to blame Trump for El Paso when the Dayton was a dirty lefty! So there!

But to me, the Dayton shooting was a bit too convenient coming so soon with that different political bent to it. Sort of like it was set-up as a distraction for El Paso.

3 possibilities come to mind for how they could do this.

1) a more simple and benign way is the political ideology of the Dayton shooter was constructed after the shooter did his dirty deed, and pasted onto him to make him look like a lefty when he really wasn't. The shooting was done organically, just happened to come so soon after El Paso. A lot of the info on the shooter's leaning seems to come from the site Heavy.com, which is of unclear reliability. Apparently his twitter feed gives most of the info, and it was taken down by twitter after the shooting, so we are relying on that the sites are honestly presenting the tweets-- we can't verify these independently (like with so much news).

2) more scary is the guy was a lefty but also known to be unstable and into guns. He was monitored and mind-controlled some way to go off as a planned distraction by the "deep state" if another shooting made Trump look bad.

3) also scary is Conor Betts, the shooter, was some sort of agent (his user name on twitter was "iamthespookster", where spook implies a spy or agent.*) posing as a lefty, and did the shootings on some sort of weird suicide mission, perhaps under orders. Maybe he thought he would be allowed to live.

Of course it's also possible that this 2nd shooting was just a great coincidence that happened to help the president, who is in constant political trouble.

Finally, we can't rule out that both the El Paso and Dayton shootings were programmed to occur by the deep state, and the political polar opposites were part of the op, and meant to further divide the US into factions.

But personally I tend to think the El Paso shooting was real as there are clearly many actual white supremacist terrorists and they are definitely feeling more excited with Trump's openly racist rhetoric from he most powerful office in the land.









*note as I write as "spooked" here, I am not a spook but am playing on the idea of being afraid of "spooks".

Trump is a Soulless Monster, Part 568

Check out this pair of fucking ghouls, acting like they just stole a baby to drink its sweet, young blood so they can live on for a few precious days before they suck another child dry. What you're looking at is Donald Trump, a worn-out sack of lies painted orange and shoved into a terrible suit, and Melania Trump, a lamprey in human form, who happen to be the President and First Lady of the United States, smiling as they hold an orphan named Paul. 

Paul became an orphan because an immigrant-hating fuckworm decided to gun down people in an El Paso, Texas, Walmart. Paul's parents, Andre and Jordan Anchondo, died protecting Paul when the fuckworm opened fire. More specifically, his mother, Jordan, was protecting Paul, and Andre leapt in front of Jordan to protect her. When Jordan was shot dead, she fell on Paul, breaking some of his tiny fingers. He had been sent home after treatment. Well, not home, per se, because that doesn't really exist anymore, but sent with family. 

But when our First Couple of ghouls needed a prop for their visit to a hospital in El Paso and almost none of the victims there could or would act as that prop, Trump's goons called and asked if Paul could be brought back. There is something so fucked up about those smiles, something so empty and soulless, something chilling and depraved, that it should hurt us to our bones to see it. 

The failure to act humble in the face of pain, pain that was caused in part by Trump's own words and actions, echoed in the fuckworm's 8chan post, is galling. And Trump's pathetic thumbs-up may as well just be a middle finger. They don't care, at least not in the sense that we generally think of empathy. They care about how they are perceived, yes, but they don't care about Paul or any of the dead or dying or wounded. 

They are our American void, the abyss we have earned, the black hole that we have come to deserve. Halfway across the country, just before Trump bragged about how his El Paso crowd size was bigger than Beto's to hospital staff who had been putting people back together, 600 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had surrounded chicken processing plants in several small Mississippi towns and then arrested 680 workers for "not having proper documentation to be in the United States." 

You ever spoken to anyone who works in a chicken processing plant? Or worked there yourself? It's a fucking nightmare of slaughter and blood and guts. It is horrible, hard work. Jesus, just imagine the noise you must deal with. 

After traumatizing the children of the workers, who had just started their school year, ICE ended up releasing 300 of the people they had taken into custody who had kids waiting for them. The parents promised that they would return for their immigration hearings. You got that? You understand that? It was literally catch and release. And while ICE claims they were always cognizant of ensuring that the mostly American children of undocumented workers were taken care of, you can fucking well bet that it wasn't until video of sobbing, pleading kids got onto the news that anything was done. 

And what did our emotionally and morally vacant president say about this today? "I want people to know that if they come into the United States illegally, they’re getting out; they’re going to be brought out. And this serves as a very good deterrent...when people see what they saw yesterday, and like they will see for a long time, they know that they’re not staying here." 

What a baldly inhuman statement, essentially saying that it's good to see children sobbing because...fuck it. I just don't want to tease that out. Fuck him. The saddest part is how many of taint-licking supporters think he's right. "Hey, if those parents didn't want their kids to suffer, they shouldn't have been here illegally," they say, as if the decision to come here was made on a whim, as if they hadn't faced extraordinary suffering and deprivation in order to take a goddamn chance and work in one of the worst fucking jobs in the nation. Trump is a leader of monsters. 

But the only funny part of this is that the raid, where no Americans who hired the undocumented workers were touched and no executives who want this cheap labor force were rounded up and driven away, is going to hurt the bottom line of the companies to the tune of millions because, well, fuck, ICE just took away a shitload of their employees. One of the plants was partially shut down today because of a lack of workers. That's what your donations to Trump got you, motherfuckers. 

It's not just that cruelty is the point, as we say all the time since Adam Serwer coined that phrase. It's also that, given the chance to even pretend not to be cruel, Trump will shove that aside, as if anything but cruelty is weakness. The orange ghoul in the White House will not soften for your dead; he will not bend for your children's pain.

It's worth noting that the El Paso shooting was the biggest attack and massacre of Hispanic Americans in our history. The shooter in that attack was motivated by anti-immigrant feelings and what does Trump do then in the aftermath but try to push for tighter immigration laws and he also had a massive sweep of illegal immigrants last night, both of which definitely are not going to calm down anti-immigrant sentiment. In fact, these acts will make things worse.

White Supremacy, Anti-Semitism and Zionism Have Related Philosophies

Really interesting piece from Truthout:

After President Trump tweeted his attack on “the Squad” of four women of color in Congress — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna S. Pressley — telling them to “go back” to their own countries, he immediately followed his racist rant with a chaser: an accusation of anti-Semitism. He claimed that they “hate Israel with a true and unbridled passion,” and that they are anti-Semitic and anti-American.

In our upside-down political world, accusations of anti-Semitism are routinely getting trotted out to justify a right-wing nationalist agenda. Lately, there’s been an explosion of political discourse around anti-Semitism, including actual incidents: from the deadly shootings at synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, California, to the desecration of Jewish graveyards, as well as endless false charges of anti-Semitism used to shut down criticism of the Israeli government. To help make sense of this landscape, some social justice organizations have been providing useful analyses about the intersecting forces of anti-Semitism, white supremacy and white nationalism.

However, in this critical moment, it is also important for us to consider how right-wing Zionism, the state of Israel and corresponding U.S. support for Israel fit into this framework. To understand the logic behind Trump’s attack and differentiate actual anti-Semitism from accusations of anti-Semitism, we must examine the role Zionism plays in this equation.

Racism and anti-Semitism both have roots in white supremacy, a system that rests on the false concept of white superiority to exploit the labor of people of color.

White supremacy includes the legacy of institutions and ideologies that emerged from Europe to justify colonization, ethnic cleansing, and enslavement that continue in the U.S. and Europe today. Emerging out of the system of white supremacy, white nationalism is a post-civil rights era movement that seeks to expel people of color and non-Christians to create an all-white Christian ethno-state.

According to analysis that builds off the work of Eric K. Ward, anti-Semitism fuels white nationalism because white nationalists have seized on the anti-Semitic trope of Jews holding secret outsized power to posit that Jews are attempting to replace white people with people of color.

The white supremacist logic depicts people of color in general (and Black folks, in particular) as subhuman.

Then, in order to explain the successful impact of Black-led justice movements, including the Movement for Black Lives, white supremacists argue that some group must be manipulating Black activists behind the scenes, and conveniently, centuries of anti-Semitism tells us who that is — the Jews (viewed as a monolithic group), who are seen as puppet masters attempting to erode white power by using people of color as their pawns. This conspiracy theory version of anti-Semitism suggests Jews are secretly running not only the media, banks and world politics, but also our movements for social justice.

At the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, white nationalists carrying tiki torches chanted “Jews will not replace us,” thus expressing this fear that all-powerful Jews will replace white people with people of color. Robert Bowers, who murdered 11 Jews in Pittsburgh, feared that Jews were bringing immigrants into the U.S.

This same fear of white replacement appears in Europe and the U.S. with the demonization of Jewish Holocaust survivor and philanthropist George Soros, who is accused of being the liberal mastermind behind everything from Black Lives Matter to refugee resettlement. Right-wing officials from the U.S. to Europe use the world “globalist” to describe Jews, including Soros, who are considered part of a global Jewish conspiracy and therefore disloyal to their own nation-states.

This analysis helps make sense of white nationalists’ anti-Semitic obsession with secret Jewish power but doesn’t explain why many white nationalists also support the state of Israel.

In fact, some white nationalists and anti-Semites, such as Richard Spencer, call themselves “white Zionists” who applaud the state of Israel for being “the most important and perhaps most revolutionary ethno-state” where they turn “for guidance.”

Why would Spencer look to Israel as a model for white nationalists? While Zionism was certainly a response to anti-Semitism, it was also modeled after the settler colonialism of Europe, which emerged from the same system of white supremacy as white nationalism.

Zionism as a nationalist movement is compatible with white nationalism because it privileges one set of people (in this case, Jews) while excluding another set of people, Palestinians, the indigenous inhabitants of the land, from its state-building project.

White nationalists love the idea of Jews being contained to their own ethno-state, which is also the aim of the Israeli government, because it increases the likelihood that white nationalists can achieve their goal of making their states (in Europe or the U.S.) purely white and Christian.

When Trump tells congresswomen of color to “go back” to their own countries, he is suggesting that the U.S. is meant only for white people. But when he accuses these same women of anti-Semitism because they are critical of the Israeli state, he links his white nationalism explicitly to Zionism.

Zionism developed in the late 19th century as a response to anti-Semitism in Europe, but it sadly reinforces the logic of anti-Semitism.

A nationalist ideology that drove the founding of the Israeli state, Zionism developed as one response to the sharp rise in violent and pervasive anti-Semitism in Europe. Under escalating attacks, European Jews at the time responded to anti-Semitism in myriad ways, including assimilation, emigration and rejecting nationalism.

The Jews who forwarded political Zionism proposed founding a Jewish nation-state in historic Palestine modeled after European settler colonialism. Theodor Herzl, the founding father of political Zionism, and his political allies argued that it was the presence of Jews in predominantly non-Jewish societies that caused anti-Semitism.

Therefore, Zionists at the time called for the exodus of Jews from Europe not to combat anti-Semitism itself, but to remove Jews from Christian countries. They appealed to the anti-Semitism of European leaders, making the case that helping to create a Jewish state elsewhere would help them expel Jews from Europe. From the start, Zionists relied on anti-Semitism to implement their political aims.

In his foundational pamphlet, Der Judenstaat, Herzl argued that “the Governments of all countries scourged by Anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain [the] sovereignty we want,” and in his diaries, Herzl predicted that “the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.”

After the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust came to light, in 1947 there was support for the establishment of a Jewish nation-state in the land of historic Palestine, which is referred to as the Nakba, or catastrophe, in Arabic, because 750,000 Palestinians had their homes and property confiscated as part of a process of ethnic cleansing that continues to this day. This founding was also a catastrophe for many Jews from across the Middle East and North Africa who were forced to leave their previous homes.

After immigration to Israel, they suffered everything from the indignity of being sprayed with DDT upon arrival to the horrors of having their children taken from them, as well as medical experimentation.

After the war, anti-Semitism was condemned by the world powers at the same time as the explicit colonial era was coming to a close and post-colonial independent states were emerging. Overt colonialism was no longer seen as a viable methodology, which left the Zionist founders of the Israeli state scrambling to represent the Israeli state as the solution to anti-Semitism, instead of as a colonial project.

This strategy then allowed them to portray Palestinian resistance not as a struggle against colonialism, but as a struggle that was inherently anti-Semitic. This story continues to this day: The state needs anti-Semitism to justify its existence, and accuses anti-colonialists of anti-Semitism.

Disturbingly, one of the most prevalent current anti-Semitic tropes, the Soros myth, was spread by two of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s key advisers. Netanyahu introduced American advisers George Birnbaum and Arthur Finkelstein to authoritarian Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in 2008 when Orbán decided to seek re-election. In 2013, they began advising him to focus his campaign on Soros as the “shadowy figure” and “puppet master” behind the scenes who controlled the economy.

In 2015 Orbán made a speech that Soros wanted to weaken the country and flood it with refugees, and by 2017, election posters around the country showed Soros’s face and the slogan “Don’t let George Soros have the last laugh!” According to BuzzFeed News, the campaign worked: “A huge part of the country turned against Soros. Orbán won in 2014 and 2018, both times with an overwhelming majority.”

Netanyahu himself has disparaged Soros, and in 2017, when Netanyahu’s son Yair posted an anti-Semitic meme showing Soros and reptilians controlling the world, David Duke came to Yair’s defense.

In addition to spreading anti-Semitic tropes, Israel’s current leadership actively supports anti-Semites and right-wing, white nationalist governments and movements as long as they support the state of Israel.

Many right-wing European nationalists support Israel because they want Jews to migrate there, and are also inspired by Israel’s racist and xenophobic policies towards Palestinians and Ethiopian Jews. The Israeli government and the far-right movements in Europe are finding common cause in their Islamophobic responses to waves of migration in Europe from predominantly Muslim countries. Israel promotes itself to Europe as an effective model for preventing the immigration of people of color.Netanyahu has deep ties with Orbán, whose mission is to keep white Christian Europe free from non-European refugees.

When the Israeli ambassador in Budapest issued a statement expressing concern over Orbán’s campaign against Soros, Netanyahu made him retract the statement. After Poland passed a highly controversial Holocaust law in 2018 making it illegal to accuse Poland of complicity in Nazi war crimes, Netanyahu and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki issued a joint statement downplaying the role of the Polish in the deaths of Jews. It was so historically inaccurate that Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum felt compelled to point out its “grave errors and deceptions.”

Trump and Netanyahu have such a close relationship that Netanyahu named a Golan Heights settlement “Trump Heights.” As president, Trump has also forwarded the notion of “globalist” George Soros financing caravans of immigrants heading from Central America to the southern U.S. border and infamously said there were good people on both sides of a deadly white supremacist march in Charlottesville, which featured anti-Semites and white nationalists.

Israel also enthusiastically supports Christian Zionists and their anti-Semitic religious doctrine, which dictates Jews must return to Israel as part of a biblical prophecy and prerequisite for the second coming of Christ. When Christ returns, if Jews don’t convert, they will end up in hell with the rest of the unsaved people.

The group Christians United for Israel (CUFI), led by televangelist Pastor John Hagee, claims to be the largest pro-Israel organization in the U.S. Hagee himself infamously preached that Hitler was “a hunter” sent by God to drive the Jews back to Palestine so that the divine prophecy could be implemented. Many Christian Zionists are also white nationalists and some of Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters. Netanyahu meets frequently with Hagee, endorses CUFI, and has spoken at numerous CUFI events.

Yet while spreading anti-Semitic myths and allying with actual anti-Semites, including Christian Zionists and far-right extremists from Washington, D.C., to Hungary, the Israeli government keeps insisting that anti-Zionists are the ones forwarding anti-Semitism.

How does a state that forwards anti-Semitism successfully lob charges of anti-Semitism at its critics? In a wildly cynical move due to its negative image worldwide, the Israeli government has been promoting the idea that a “new” form of anti-Semitism has developed in the last decade, which manifests as opposition to Zionism and criticism of the Israeli state. In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) proposed a working definition of anti-Semitism that states “manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity.”

One example the Alliance gives of anti-Semitism is “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” In 2018, Netanyahu argued that “vicious efforts to demonize the Jewish state and deny the Jewish people the right to self-determination” are a “new form of anti-Semitism.”

With the urging of Netanyahu, the U.S. State Department and the EU have adopted the IHRA definition.Ironically, this definition of the “new anti-Semitism” reinforces anti-Semitism by conflating the Jewish people with a nation-state. Political Research Associates, a group monitoring right-wing extremism, defines anti-Semitism as a form of bigotry that treats Jews (who are racially, economically and politically diverse) as a single body — “The Jews.”

When the Israeli government conflates the state of Israel with “the Jewish people,” it treats us as a singular entity. It’s also inaccurate because the majority of Jews in the world live outside Israel and many of us dis-identify with the state completely. Another way the IHRA definition reinforces anti-Semitism, by its own definition, is through naming Israel a “Jewish collectivity.” The authors say “holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the state of Israel” is an example of anti-Semitism at the same time that they “conceive” of the state as “Jewish collectivity.” This move to collapse Jews into the state increases the likelihood that we will be held responsible for the oppressive actions of the state.

We can’t fight real anti-Semitism without differentiating it from the false and often racist accusations that are used to protect Israel from criticism.

From its origins, Zionism as a nationalist ideology wasn’t and still isn’t an attempt to eradicate anti-Semitism or make the lives of all Jewish people better — only those who support and participate in its nation-building project. If we really want to eradicate anti-Semitism, we must refuse to let our diverse and diasporic Jewish communities be reduced to a nation state.

The fight for justice for Palestinians, it turns out, is also a fight for Jewish liberation — a fight that will liberate Jews from having our identities used to justify the colonialism of the Israeli state. If we want to stand against white supremacy, white nationalism and anti-Semitism, there is only one place for us to stand: on the side of justice for Palestinians, for Jews, for all of us trying to be free.

by Wendy Elisheva Somerson, one of the founders of the Seattle chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, believes that combining art, activism, and ritual can help us envision and create the world to come. Based in the Pacific Northwest, they train organizations on how to do Palestine solidarity work without being anti-Semitic and work as a politicized somatic healer helping people heal trauma through the body.

Reality Winner

Reality Winner has likely done more to save our country from Trump than James Comey and Bob Mueller combined.

Here is a great twitter thread on what she did to reveal how Russia interfered in the 2016 election and Trump's perfidy and crookedness.

50 Years Ago, America Pretended Its Astronauts Went to the Moon

The late great Dave McGowan's "Wagging the Moondoggie" essay series is still probably the best debunking of that whole thing.

There's so many reasons to be skeptical of the Apollo landings, and the best arguments are never mentioned by the MSM, of course.

Dave McGowan's brother is still around promoting his work and is on Facebook. Here is a long post where he defends his brother's work and debunks the landings.

Here is Anonymous Physicist's essay on the topic, which has many good points.

This video about the wires helping the astronauts look weightless is still up and good. There are other examples too of course.

We're Getting Tangled Up by the Trump Octopus of Evil

The 8 Evil Arms of the Trump Octopus:

1) Climate change denial in the time of an ongoing climate emergency
2) Crimes against immigrants, separating children from families
3) Russian asset; being bough by various countries; national security threat
4) Corruption and kleptocracy, Emoluments
5) Sexual crimes; assault, rape, pedophilia, sex trafficking with Jeffrey Epstein and others
6) Endless lying and ignorance
7) Delusion and ridiculous bragging
8) Degradation of rule of law: obstruction of justice, a corrupt Atty General in William Barr

It's too much for anyone to take on all at once, because no one can take on so much evil, especially when one major political party pretends none of the this is happening or is a problem. It's all so  maddening for anyone who cares. And much of the awfulness tends to draw attention from the other awfulness. It's a blizzard of sordid criminal behavior that gets to be simply overwhelming.


David Rothkopf lays it out in more detail:

It's being a traitor.  But it's not just being a traitor.  It's the
obstruction of justice but its not just the obstruction of justice. 
It's the attacks on rule of law.  But it's not just the attacks on the
rule of law.  It's the assault on freedom of the press.

But it's not just the assault on freedom of the press.  It's the
pathological lying.  But it's not just the pathological lying.  It's the
 unfitness for office.  But it's not just the unfitness for office. 
It's the incompetence.  But it's not just the incompetence.

It's the attacks on our most important allies and alliances.  But
it's not just the attacks on most important allies and alliances.  It's
the systematic destruction of our environment.  But it's not just the
systematic destruction of our environment.

It's the violation of international treaties and agreements.  But it
 is not just the violation of international treaties and agreements. 
It's the embrace of our enemies.  But it is not just the embrace of our
enemies.

It's the defense of murdering dictators but it is not just the
defense of murdering dictators.  It is the serial undermining of our
national security.  But it is not just the serial undermining of our
national security.  It is the nepotism.  But it's not just the nepotism.

It's the attacks on our federal law enforcement and intelligence
communities.  But it is not just the attacks on our federal law
enforcement and intelligence communities.  It's the fiscal recklessness.
  But it's not just the fiscal recklessness.

It's the degradation of the office and of public discourse in
America.  But it's not just the degradation of the office and of public
discourse in America.  It's the support of Nazis and white supremacists.
  But it's not just the support of Nazis and white supremacists.

It's the dead in Puerto Rico and the at the border.  But it's not
just the dead in Puerto Rico and at the border.  It's turning the US
government into a criminal conspiracy to empower and enrich the
president and his supporters.

But it's not just the turning the US government into a criminal
conspiracy to empower and enrich the president and his supporters.  It's
 weaponization of politics in America to attack the weak.  But it's not
just the weaponization of American politics to attack the weak.

It's all these things together and the threat of worse to come.  It
is the damage that can not be undone.  It is pathology that has
overtaken our politics and our society, the revelation that 40 percent
of the population and an entire political party are profoundly immoral.

It is a disease that has infected our system and is killing it.  At
the moment, we still have the wherewithal to fight back.  But even those
 who recognize the dangers of this litany of crimes are proving too
complacent, too inert in the face of this threat.

It is one of those moments in the history of a country when there is
 a choice to be made, a choice between having a future and not, between
growth and decay, between democracy and oligarchy, between what we
dreamt of being and what even our founders feared we might become.

The litany of crises and crimes is so long that we are becoming
numb.  You have heard of the fog of war. This is the fog of Trump. The
volume of wrongs becomes its own defense. Is the president accused of
being a rapist?  Well, then remind them he is a racist and they'll
forget.

This is a moment for leaders to step up.  To challenge each of these
 abuses via every legal means available.  To organize and draw attention
 to them.  To blow the whistle if you are in government and you are
being asked to violate your oath.  To resist and refuse to be complicit.

If you can't do those things that make your voice heard and join a
movement, support a political candidate, donate money, register voters,
fight voter suppression.  But whatever you do, resist becoming numb. 
Resist the temptation to let the recitation of old crimes and new...

...become a deadening drone.  Every one matters in times like these.
  Every one must stand up for what is right.  In their homes.  In their
schools.  In the workplace.  In their churches and synagogues and
mosques.

We are approaching a great national decision about whether the
American experiment will succeed or fail, whether this moment does what
two world wars, a civil war and countless past misjudgments and missteps
 could not.

We will make it together, resist, offer a better alternative,
embrace that alternative and the best leaders we can find...or succumb,
let the inertia of some among us mark the end of what for two and half
centuries was an idea so compelling it inspired the world.