“History is not on your side”

From a recent town hall meeting in California about the actions of ICE and the local sheriff’s cooperation comes a moment of truth from a 90 year old Auschwitz survivor who knows what he is seeing:

https://twitter.com/trumpera_2017/status/959998849065635840

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Vox posted that the way we win our country back, we must get some of the White working class back, there’s no way around it.

Let’s not forget that it was the Obama Democrats who abandoned the working class for “eggheads and African Americans”, as Paul Begala put it. We 2008 Clinton supporters watched in dismay as it walked away in a huff and joined the Tea Party.

I’m not totally onboard with bending and scraping to the white working class. First of all, I AM white working class, as are the vast majority of people in this country who work for a living and do not live off their investments. So it’s not “white” or “working class” that divides us. Let’s not separate ourselves from them on imaginary class lines. Let’s define ourselves by who we did or did not vote for because that is the bright dividing line.

Whatever we have to do to get Trump voters back should not include jettisoning our principles. The problems with the Trump voters (and let’s not sugar coat this, there are problems), is they willfully abandoned whatever values they had because Trump directly appealed to their hidden fears, desires and resentments whether that was maniacal insistence on perfect security, sheer greed, genuine racism, neediness to have someone take care of them, activated grievances, fundamentalist wishful thinking, gleeful misogyny or a half dozen other things. It wasn’t just racism. I’d really like Democrats to stop assuming race was the only principal component. It was only the largest of many.

It was these dark fears and desires that the GOP has been stimulating and feeding for decades now. It got out of hand with the election of Trump. And let’s not forget the boatload of money from long time Republican donors with very specific agendas whether those are reversing the New Deal, rolling back taxes to almost nothing for themselves, going “weightless” in the workplace, profiting from war, and rent seeking from the fossil fuel industry, the telecom industry, and the healthcare industry. They’re the ones who funded the politicians and talking heads and gave them the tools of psychological manipulation and a platform to amplify their voices.

I’m not sure how you can appeal to people who are in the grip of delusion. My own personal history of having grown up in a high control group suggests that this will be a Herculean task. Getting into the delusion relied on deliberately pricking at the thing many people secretly fear or desire with fine precision. This is what cult indoctrination is all about. It’s an emotional thing, not a rational thing. Inevitably, we will have to also appeal to emotion and right now many people on the right have locked us out. They’re listening to their leaders.

We’ve got to make them realize that the people they think are their enemies, ie the Clinton supporters, are just as subject to this careless economy as they are. That we also are fearful of our safety and for our futures. We live in the same country and are subject to the same injustices and scarcities. We are also only one paycheck away from devastating consequences to our quality of life. This is what the Bernie people were trying to say. This is what every volunteer for the Clinton campaign that I met in 2016 was saying. We are not a separate tribe living by different laws of nature. What affects the white working class affects all of us, white, black, college educated or self employed, home healthcare aids and teachers and construction workers.

We’re ALL getting screwed.

What makes us different from the Trump voters is we haven’t abandoned our empathy for each other in an effort to frantically save ourselves.

This is a much harder thing to convey to the Trump white working class because regardless as to whether it materially benefits from the Trump years, there is no denying that it feels powerful. They feel special for a change. They’ve been love bombed by the manipulators on the right. And unfortunately, too many of them lack the self discipline of mind to realize how much more powerful they would actually be if they ditched their greedy overlords and joined with us.

Like I said, it’s going to be very, very difficult. I can’t think of any politicians on the left right now who can pull it off. Also, there are elements on the left who will not tolerate anything less than purity.

We’ve got to deal with them first.

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About that memo.

Democrats, please stop going over the details in that stupid document in an effort to change some Trump supporters minds. For one thing, adding this FISA angle to what should be a very simple case of Watergate repeating itself is only going to end up confusing people. It’s one more moving part they need to keep track of.

Keep it simple stupid. The facts are: there was another illegal break in at the DNC in and election year. The intent was to gather information on one candidate to be used to discredit her.

Then the guilty candidate’s campaign engaged in a coverup. They tried to deny that they had anything to do with the burglars. This turns out not to be true.

Then that candidate, now president, engaged in obstructing justice in order to derail the investigation into the break in and why it was done in the first place and who owes what to whom.

That’s the Watergate story and it’s also the Russiagate story. We all know what happened during Watergate and this scandal is following the same trajectory.

All the memo does is point out a couple of truths about Donald Trump:

1.) He has something to hide and it’s big and ugly. I’d go with money laundering but something tells me that’s not the whole story. Money laundering is complex and confusing your base with who bought what from whom to hide what asset will just make them doubled down on their support for their guy who after all, is not a politician. He’s a business man. It doesn’t matter that this is a big, illegal thing. They won’t care about that. So, my guess is that it’s something bigger and nastier than that. And I don’t mean pee tapes.

If I were to hazard a guess as to the worst thing that Trump could be involved in that would finally make his base turn on him in revulsion it would have to be something along the lines of human trafficking. Yep, I’m going there. I’m betting that it’s his connection to organized crime and all that ugliness that he’s trying to hide. It’s the kind of thing that would make even Ivanka and Eric squirm. And I don’t think there are many Americans who would tolerate it. So, that’s what I’m going with. It’s his connection to a very dark underworld that he’s hiding.

2.) Trump is a very weak man. This memo screams weakness.

Yep, because how many times has Hillary voluntarily met with the FBI or testified under oath. She just pulls up her big boy pants and goes down to meet with them and tells them what she knows or what she did.

She doesn’t throw a tantrum. She doesn’t blame the people who are holding her accountable, whether their accusations have any merit or not (I’m looking at you Trey Gowdy). She doesn’t tweet about how unfair it all is.

But Trump does.

He’s very, very weak. He doesn’t have the balls to do what Hillary Clinton has done for decades. He can’t stand the heat of some FBI agent or congressman asking him tough questions for hour after hour in front of the public.

He can’t do it because he’s just a soft, cowardly and weak old man who has to run and hide behind some stupid memo instead of facing his accusers.

That’s who he is. Old, ugly, soft and weak. He’s no Hope Hicks boy toy and Stormy Daniels will want more money next time.

The sexiest thing in his pants is his wallet because he has no balls.

That’s the message that Democrats need to get across. Take a lesson from Newt Gingrich’s Language: a key mechanism of control pamphlet. Find all the synonyms for the word “weak” and use them liberally on every Sunday talking heads show over and over again. Use every opportunity to bring up Nixon.

Attack his image.

He will absolutely HATE it.