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Thread: Terminal Liberalism

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    Oppression chic: Nike offers “Pro Hijab” for athletic Muslimas

    March 8, 2017 12:36 pm By Robert Spencer 9 Comments
    Will Nike offer stoning supplies for adulterous Muslimas? Will Nike offer a series of blades suitable for slitting the throats of Muslimas who dare not to wear the hijab? Will Nike offer Klan hoods for racist athletes? “Nike Has A New Product For Muslim Women: The ‘Pro Hijab,’” by Zahraa Alkhalisi, CNN, March 7, 2017: […]
    They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
    “As a general rule, the earlier you recognize someone is trying to kill you, the better off you’ll be.”

    "You think a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a sheet of glass."



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    They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
    “As a general rule, the earlier you recognize someone is trying to kill you, the better off you’ll be.”

    "You think a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a sheet of glass."



  3. #383
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    They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
    “As a general rule, the earlier you recognize someone is trying to kill you, the better off you’ll be.”

    "You think a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a sheet of glass."



  4. #384
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    Cate Blanchett: My Moral Compass Is 'In My Vagina'

    By Tyler O'Neil March 8, 2017
    chat 13 comments

    Cate Blanchett: My Moral Compass Is 'In My Vagina' (along with several other appliances)
    YouTube screenshot of Cate Blanchett on "The Late Show" with Stephen Colbert.

    A few days before International Women's Day, when anti-Trump protesters planned to strike for "A Day Without a Woman," actress Cate Blanchett said that her moral compass is "in my vagina."
    "It's all about, as you move forward in life, what's your moral compass — where does kindness and humanity sit in a really brutal world?" Blanchett, best known for her role as Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, said on "The Late Show" with Stephen Colbert Saturday.
    Colbert asked her, "What is your moral compass? Where does kindness and humanity sit in a brutal world?"
    "It's in my vagina," Blanchett quipped, as the audience broke out in laughter and applause. The actress then pretended to leave the set, as if she'd said all there was to say.
    Blanchett's statement was intended as a joke, but it arguably reveals the mentality of much of the "women's movement" against President Donald Trump. Protesters involved in "A Day Without a Woman," organized by the same people behind the "Women's March" after Trump's inauguration, seem driven by a less-than-rational anger at the sitting president.
    Sponsored

    The event's website described the event as standing up against the forces of "fear, greed and hatred." As International Women's Day began, Trump himself tweeted his respect and honor for women, which might seem surprising to those protesting him as the ultimate misogynistic bogeyman.
    But there is an explanation for this sub-rational marshaling of protesters, and it comes in Blanchett's own words. At the "Women's March," hundreds of women — and men! — dressed in vagina costumes, and there was a campaign to knit "pussyhats" beforehand. In a world where "The Vagina Monologues" are considered "empowering," this might not come as a surprise so much as a national cultural embarrassment.
    There are feminists who identify with a certain part of their anatomy, and they do indeed act as though that is their "moral compass."
    Indeed, the Huffington Post's Rebecca Shapiro called the vagina-moral compass declaration "another reason to love Cate Blanchett."



    But what does this declaration say about feminism, the anti-Trump marches, and American society in general? What does it tell America's boys, who lack that most sacred of conscientious body parts? What do these protests tell the children whose schools have been cancelled because teachers care more about a political statement than they do about educating children? What do these messages tell employers who see their workers demanding leave for an ostensibly moral cause?
    President Trump's Message on 'Day Without a Woman' Might Surprise 'Strikers'


    While some see a triumph for women, others see degradation. PJ Media's Susan L.M. Goldberg explained how the "Women's March" "reinforced every negative stereotype about women ever." Debra Heine noted that the "Day Without A Woman" should really be called "A Day Without Left-Wing Women Who Vote Democrat And Want Bigger Government Controlling Everyone's Lives."
    Sponsored


    How does a vagina become a moral compass? And if it were indeed a moral compass, why does it sound more like Harry Reid and Barack Obama than Mia Love and Nikki Haley? Contrary to the liberal narrative, women are not all angry social justice warrior progressives, and the moral compass doesn't rest in a sexual part of the anatomy, or in the Left's nexus of identity politics. If it did, there would be no good reason to trust it.
    Yes, Cate Blanchett was joking. But all good jokes have a basis in reality, and "A Day Without a Woman" shows exactly what that basis is. Blanchett wasn't calling on women to let their conscience be guided by their genitalia, but it seems a lot of people are.
    Last edited by Lenno; 03-09-2017 at 10:02 AM.
    They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
    “As a general rule, the earlier you recognize someone is trying to kill you, the better off you’ll be.”

    "You think a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a sheet of glass."



  5. #385
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    THE REAL RESISTANCE
    “In five weeks’ time, unless desperate measure are taken, we will hand over the government to a man who lost the popular vote…There is no time for a full review or measured analysis.”
    -Keith Olbermann

    As soon as President Trump was elected, the left in America immediately began a campaign of opposition and efforts to delegitimize the Trump administration even before he was in office. Creaky, old leftist radicals such as Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann stepped out of the cobwebs and declared a resistance was on, as if America was occupied.
    This "resistance" showed its self in riots on the streets, people being beaten, things burned, windows broken, shops looted, and in calls for violence against anyone declared a "fascist." The far left has been calling anyone who disagrees with them "fascist" since the 1940s, but now they somehow have managed to mainstream the concept with the media and entertainment community.
    For some, the dream of being a freedom fighter in an oppressive regime that somehow never actually quite represses them never dies. If Donald Trump truly was "literally Hitler" then people would not be able to go onto the streets and yell it out loud around cops. But I think just about everybody knows that, and this "resistance" is getting all the respect it deserves: roughly the same as trial lawyers and undertakers.
    THE OUTSIDERS
    Back in 2007-2008 when Barack Hussein Obama was running for president, he hit a lot of themes that resonated well with Americans, including me. He called on change, on transparency, on getting the lobbyists and greed out of politics. He called for the federal government to be more accountable, to stop spying on Americans. He called for politicians to be forced to listen to and obey the American people instead of imposing their ideas on the public.
    Many of the things President Obama said in speeches were good things that people wanted to hear. People in the USA had become sick of congressmen who ignored their will, presidents who they felt were ignoring them and lying to them, sick of secrets, sick of trickery, sick of politics as usual.
    Americans felt that we were living in a nation run by a small group of elites who sneered at them, people who had riches and power and contempt for the rest of the nation. And there's some good reasons for suspecting that. Here's a list of the last presidents and which colleges they went to:
    George Bush - Yale
    Bill Clinton - Yale
    George W Bush - Harvard
    Barack Obama - Harvard
    Donald Trump - Wharton
    And here's a list of Supreme Court justices and the colleges they went to:
    Samuel Alito - Harvard
    Stephen Breyer - Harvard
    Ruth Bader Ginsberg - Harvard
    Elena Kagan - Harvard
    Anthony Kennedy - Harvard
    John Roberts - Harvard
    Sonia Sotomayor - Yale
    Clarence Thomas - Yale
    In fact, if you go through the halls of congress, 44 of the 100 senators attended an Ivy League university, although the House of Representatives is more cosmopolitan.with about 30 who never attended any college at all.
    Now, there's not necessarily anything wrong with ivy League graduates being in positions of power, they were at one time very fine institutions of higher learning with great prestige. Colleges such as Princeton University gave us men like James Madison as president.
    However, there is a distinct pattern of people from a specific class and type who are in power, following a particular wealthy profile and in a definite clique of association. No matter which party they are part of, the elite are generally in a tight group of similar schools, clubs, associations, locations, and so on.
    They might be enemies in front of a camera, but behind the scenes go party together, are old buddies, and so on. Justice Anthony Scalia (Harvard) was best buds with Justice Ginsberg, despite being polar opposites in viewpoint. Senators notoriously are super tight and close, careful to not criticize each other in public and backing each other up if attacked by a non-Senator.
    The federal government has been pushing one gigantic spending bill after another obnoxious law for decades, even as the public continues to complain and tell them to stop. Every regulation that limits freedom, every penny-ante law banning incandescent lightbulbs and restricting flow on your shower, every stupid little infringement on our liberty is met with increasing grumpiness and annoyance by the public.
    Like a fog pouring in under the door, the government is spreading through all our lives, covering more and more and while people aren't reaching for their rifles, they are pretty well annoyed.
    And its not a right vs left thing. Occupy had many of the same concerns and frustrations that the Tea Party did. Obama voters were looking for as much change as Trump voters. Here's how it played out.
    And the result of that annoyance was President Obama, the least likely president in American history. Voters picked a radical lightweight with almost no experience or qualifications to be president because the last guys had been part of the old system and people wanted things to... get this... change.
    What they got was different but not the change they wanted. People wanted the government to bother them less, to fix the economy, to listen to them. Instead they got a gigantic "stimulus" package that was little more than payoffs to special groups, a massively unpopular health insurance bill that's still opposed by most Americans and is turning out even worse than feared, and even more ridiculous regulations telling people what they can and cannot do. It was a change, but not the change people hoped for.
    So we get Donald Trump, who comes along saying what people wanted to hear, and representing change, again. He's technically a product of the Ivy League (economics degree from Wharton), but like President Obama he does not seem to be from the same pack of elites and club memberships as the rest of the people in power. He is reviled by both Democrat and Republican in office, he's condemned for being not a politician, and is yet another "outsider" elected by the people to make a difference.
    So far, President Trump is a bit of an outsider (his policies on immigration and national identity are definitely outside the elite comfort zone) but hasn't done much to clean up the swamp as he promised. Its still early, so we can't decide how effective or how typical President Trump will be in office, but its part of the same pattern: "This guy says he'll change things, he's not some insider politician so much, okay give him a shot. No? How about this guy, he's even more an outsider, he's never held office. We'll try him."
    They're cut from the same electoral cloth despite their policy differences. President Trump ran more as a Bill Clinton center-left guy, and President Obama as a more radical left guy, but they both are a statement of voter dislike of the status quo.
    THE ACTUAL RESISTANCE
    I'd like to suggest a resistance is already underway in America, and has been for quite some time now. The resistance is not to "anyone who isn't sufficiently leftist" as guys like Moore say. Its people sick of the system and demanding things be different. For the most part, Americans want to be left alone, and they want their representatives to listen to what they say. Not what lobbyists say, not what fat cats say, not what big money says, not what the news media and the entertainment community says, but what they want.
    And the resistance is not to one policy group or another per se, but rather to the arrogance, dismissive attitude, condescension, and contempt they feel from their government. Americans are increasingly fed up with the crap they're being handed almost daily and want real change.
    There's a reason the elites in both parties are fighting so hard right now, using every underhanded trick, lie, sneaky political stunt, and even working across the aisle to stop President Trump and ruin him. The reason is because there's a chance -- a small one, perhaps -- but a chance that he actually may work to demolish the entrenched power, actually clean up the swamp, and reboot the government. And certainly he's not one of them, so he has to be dealt with, like Judge Smails sneering at Al Czervic in Caddyshack.
    But those guys on the street with signs and chants and slogans? The ones breaking things and beating people and rioting? The angry and hysterical voices on TV?
    They aren't the resistance. They're who the resistance is against.
    And the old saying goes, there are three boxes of resistance to tyranny and abuse of power. The ballot box, the jury box, and the ammo box. Keep refusing to listen and people move on to the next box. We don't want that last one opened up, but if this time doesn't accomplish at least some of what the voters want, I have no confidence what happens next.
    They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
    “As a general rule, the earlier you recognize someone is trying to kill you, the better off you’ll be.”

    "You think a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a sheet of glass."



  6. #386
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    Default Liberal Sexual Predators? Say It Ain't So!

    Sexual harassment: records show how University of California faculty target students

    Documents reveal patterns in how officials appear to target vulnerable students they oversee – in some cases dramatically impeding their studies and careers




    At UCLA alone, at least six faculty members faced sexual misconduct investigations. Photograph: Boden/Ledingham/Getty Images/Radius Images














    Wednesday 8 March 2017 06.00 EST Last modified on Wednesday 8 March 2017 19.05 EST

    University of California professor Eric Gans told his female graduate student that he loved her – and that “in another universe”, they were meant to share a life together.
    “I have never seen you more beautiful than the past two days,” the French and Francophone studies professor wrote to the student in May 2011, when he was 69 years old. “I can’t help feeling that … you are being beautiful for me, that I somehow inspire this beauty.”

    ‘Honey bear’: Berkeley student details alleged sexual advances by professor


    Exclusive: Nicole Hemenway describes how repeated harassment by her thesis adviser derailed her studies – and how the school system failed to protect her


    Read more



    The letter came one week before the UC Los Angeles (UCLA) student had to take an exam that Gans would evaluate. It caused her to become anxious and depressed, and according to a university investigation, was one of many sexually harassing messages he sent even though she repeatedly stated she was not interested in a romantic relationship.
    The report about Gans, who eventually stepped down, is part of a massive release of public records surrounding 113 cases of alleged sexual misconduct by employees across the University of California. The more than a thousand pages of documents from one of the largest and most prestigious public university systems in the US offer an unprecedented look at the scope and scale of claims of sexual harassment and violence that activists say have long plagued college campuses.
    A review by the Guardian, which received the records last week, revealed similarities in the way faculty, advisers and other academic officials appear to target vulnerable students they oversee – in some cases dramatically impeding their studies and careers.
    “One single influential professor can make or break the entire career of a student,” said Noreen Farrell, executive director of Equal Rights Advocates, a national civil rights group that has fought gender discrimination at UC. “This is not unique to the University of California.”
    ‘I really was terrified’

    The records release comes after a year of intense scrutiny on the UC system surrounding multiple high-profile cases of powerful faculty members and administrators who avoided serious consequences after investigators substantiated claims of sexual harassment.
    The documents include completed investigation reports and resulting disciplinary records from January 2013 to April 2016 across 10 campuses. Roughly 35% of the complaints came from students, and a quarter of all accused were faculty, according to university officials.
    The records reveal that investigators substantiated students’ claims against UC professors for a wide range of misconduct, including lewd comments, unwanted propositions, inappropriate touching and sexual assault.
    Some were terminated or resigned, but others faced minimal consequences, the records show. One-third of the accused still work for the university.

    Berkeley professor at center of sexual harassment scandal sues his accusers


    A professor at the prestigious university, who is the subject of three complaints, has filed defamation suits against the women he is accused of sexually harassing


    Read more



    At UCLA alone, at least six faculty members faced sexual misconduct investigations. One unnamed associate professor there allegedly told a female student that she “looked so beautiful” and he was “distracted by her charm”. In an email, he said he was inspired to write her poetry.
    According to an investigator’s report, when the student subsequently skipped class because she felt uncomfortable, the professor reprimanded her, emailing: “You really should not be missing classes. This is very serious, as it is disruptive to your education.”
    The complaint was resolved with a settlement in which the professor did not admit wrongdoing but agreed to pay a $7,500 fee in lieu of a suspension without pay.
    Another unnamed male faculty member at UCLA was accused of sending flirtatious and sexual emails to a female student. After she rejected him, he emailed: “Will try and take a cold shower. Don’t know if it’s gonna work though.”
    The student, describing the impact of the messages, said: “I spent my days not studying my research but agonizing over how I could possibly fix a situation that I had not created.”
    I spent my days not studying my research but agonizing over how I could possibly fix a situation that I had not created
    “I really was terrified of what would happen to me academically if I had to cut him from my life.”
    The faculty member also resolved the matter with a settlement.
    UCLA spokesman Tod Tamberg told the Guardian that both professors who settled remain at the university.
    ‘A vicious cycle’

    While there has been increasing recognition of the epidemic of campus sexual assault in America, the UC records reveal a disturbing pattern in how administrators deal with assailants when they are faculty, Farrell said: “It’s a vicious cycle. How is a college to shift a culture among its students if it’s giving a free pass to its own employees?”
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    According to the investigator, Gans, the French studies professor who told his student that he loved her, claimed that he believed his overtures to his student were “welcome”, even though she repeatedly suggested otherwise, including one message that said, “I have to make it clear that I don’t see you in a romantic way.”
    Gans also reached a settlement that allowed him to assume “emeritus status” but blocked him from teaching, mentoring or advising students in the future.
    In an email to the Guardian, Gans criticized the university’s process, saying he was not able to present his side of the case and was not “given anything resembling the ‘due process of law’ guaranteed by the constitution”.
    Investigators at UC Santa Cruz determined that Hector Perla, an assistant professor of Latin American and Latino studies, sexually assaulted one of his female students in 2015. Perla, who could not be reached for comment, resigned when disciplinary proceedings began, according to the university. The student’s lawyers recently announced that UC agreed to pay $1.15m to settle the case, which is believed to be one of the largest Title IX settlements in the history of Title IX, the federal anti-discrimination law.
    I really was terrified of what would happen to me academically if I had to cut him from my life
    Academic officials at many levels faced accusations, according to the records.
    At UC Merced, a male instructing lecturer asked a former female student to meet with him to see if she would be interested in helping him grade papers. Later, according to an investigation report, the lecturer sent her a text message that said, “I wanted you to take your pants off.”
    The employee, whose name was redacted, was given a warning.
    Joseph Lewis, a dean at UC Irvine, was found to have violated harassment policies after an unnamed person filed a complaint about the administrator making offensive sexual and misogynistic comments and inappropriate touching. Lewis, who did not respond to requests for comment, resigned as dean but was able to take a paid sabbatical, according to spokesman Tom Vasich: “He is aware of and will abide by policies regarding faculty conduct.”
    Advertisement


    Kathleen Salvaty, the UC’s systemwide coordinator for Title IX said the university has strengthened its policies and procedures since many of these cases were adjudicated, including improving opportunities for confidential reporting and mandating that faculty alert her office to complaints of harassment.
    “The more we educate our students about their rights and their options, I think students can feel empowered,” she said.
    The university has noted that the complaints cover a large system that employs 250,000 people. But Salvaty admitted that there were likely other victims who decided not to come forward: “The cases that distress me are the cases where the people don’t report.”
    They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
    “As a general rule, the earlier you recognize someone is trying to kill you, the better off you’ll be.”

    "You think a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a sheet of glass."



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    They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
    “As a general rule, the earlier you recognize someone is trying to kill you, the better off you’ll be.”

    "You think a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a sheet of glass."



  8. #388
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    Samantha Bee Mocks Conservative’s ‘Nazi’ Haircut, Except He Has Brain Cancer

    Offers weak apology when she’s called out.

    3.9.2017
    News
    Trey Sanchez


    Self-described comedienne and left-wing political commentator Samantha Bee just insulted a man with brain cancer.
    On her TBS show Full Frontal, Bee sent her correspondent, Mike Rubens, to CPAC to find out what a conservative is “these days,” because she has “no f***ing clue what conservatism means.” Duly noted.
    The video of Rubens’ time there is nothing more than mocking everything he sees with a sarcastic voiceover. They called the clip, “Whither Conservatism: ein film für Full Frontal.” That’s so they could compare conservatives to Nazis, of course.
    As was declared by The Washington Post last year, a favorite hipster haircut for celebs and skinny-jeaned latte sippers — shaved sides, and a pile of gelled hair on top — now means you’re a white nationalist. Not everyone got that "memo" so, the style is still popular and Rubens noticed several CPAC attendees sporting it. He remarked:
    “Just last year, CPAC was dominated by Ted Cruz supporters and chirpy little sh*ts with bow ties… This year, the bow ties were gone, replaced with nazi hair. Nazi hair, Nazi hair, f*** off.”
    As it turned out, one person shown in the video chose the haircut while he’s battling brain cancer. His sister was appalled that her brother was mocked and tweeted:
    They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
    “As a general rule, the earlier you recognize someone is trying to kill you, the better off you’ll be.”

    "You think a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a sheet of glass."



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    Default Complete Delusional Word Wanking

    Dear Red-State Trump Voter,
    Let’s face it, guys: We’re done.
    For more than 80 years now, we—the residents of what some people like to call Blue America, but which I prefer to think of as the United States of We Pay Our Own Damn Way—have shelled out far more in federal tax monies than we took in. We have funded massive infrastructure projects in your rural counties, subsidized your schools and your power plants and your nursing homes, sent you entire industries, and simultaneously absorbed the most destitute, unskilled, and oppressed portions of your populations, white and black alike.
    All of which, it turns out, only left you more bitter, white, and alt-right than ever.





    Some folks here in self-supporting America like to believe that there must be a way to bring you back to your senses and to restore rational government, if not liberal ideals, sometime in the foreseeable future. Everyone seems to have an answer for how to do this. Every day another earnest little homily finds its way to me over my internet transom: “Think locally, act globally,” or “Make art and fight the power,” or the old Joe Hill standby—“Don’t mourn. Organize.”
    To which I say: Don’t organize. Pack.
    Not literally, of course. Not even the good people of Canada should have to stomach a mass migration of moping American liberals mumbling, “Live locally … make art.” What I mean is that it’s time for blue states and cities to effectively abandon the American national enterprise, as it is currently constituted. Call it the New Federalism. Or Virtual Secession. Or Conscious Uncoupling—though that’s already been used. Or maybe Bluexit.
    Truth is, you red states just haven’t been pulling your weight. Not for, well, forever. Red states are nearly twice as dependent on the federal government as blue states. Of the twelve states that received the least federal aid in return for each tax dollar they contribute to the U.S. Treasury, ten of them voted for Hillary Clinton—and the other two were Michigan and Wisconsin, your newest recruits. By the same count, 20 of the 26 states most dependent on federal aid went to Trump.
    Take Mississippi (please!), famous for being 49th or 50th in just about everything that matters. When it comes to sucking at the federal teat, the Magnolia State is the undisputed champ. More than 40 percent of Mississippi’s state revenue comes from federal funding; one-third of its GDP comes from federal spending; for every dollar it pays out in federal taxes, it takes in $4.70 in federal aid; one in five residents are on food stamps—all national highs. You people—your phrase, not mine—liked to bash Obama for turning America into what you derisively referred to as “Food Stamp Nation.” In reality, it’s more like Food Stamp Red America—something your Trump-loving congressmen will discover if and when they fulfill their vow to gut the program.
    Trump’s characterization of “American carnage” in our urban centers aside, cities now generate the vast majority of America’s wealth—the cities, that is, where blue folks live. It’s true that Hillary Clinton carried just 487 counties in 2016. It’s also true that those 487 counties generate almost two-thirds of the nation’s economic activity.
    More than a century ago, William Jennings Bryan—a real populist—assured angry rural citizens that if we burned down our cities, they would spring up again as if by magic, fueled by the prosperity and providence of the nation’s farmers. Today, if we were to burn down our cities, the rest of the country would likely become a wholly owned province of the People’s Republic of China.
    So here’s my modest proposal:
    You go your way, we go ours.
    We give up. You win. From now on, we’ll treat the animating ideal on which the United States was founded—out of many, one—as dead and buried.
    We give up. You win. From now on, we’ll treat the animating ideal on which the United States was founded—out of many, one—as dead and buried. Federalism, true federalism, which you have vilified for the past century, is officially over, at least in spirit. You want to organize the nation around your cherished principle of states’ rights—the idea that pretty much everything except the U.S. military and paper currency and the national anthem should be decided at the local level? Fine. We won’t formally secede, in the Civil War sense of the word. We’ll still be a part of the United States, at least on paper. But we’ll turn our back on the federal government in every way we can, just like you’ve been urging everyone to do for years, and devote our hard-earned resources to building up our own cities and states. We’ll turn Blue America into a world-class incubator for progressive programs and policies, a laboratory for a guaranteed income and a high-speed public rail system and free public universities. We’ll focus on getting our own house in order, while yours falls into disrepair and ruin.
    In short, we’ll take our arrogant, cosmopolitan, liberal-elite football—wait, make that soccer ball—and go home.

    Shocking as your electoral victory felt to us in Blue America, we should have seen it coming. To paraphrase Virgil “the Turk” Sollozzo from The Godfather, the Democrats, with all due respect, had been slipping. Twenty years ago, could any organization as stone-cold crazy as the Tea Party have gotten to them? The staggering defeats that Democrats sustained, at every level of government, in the midterm elections of 1994, 2010, and 2014 have now reduced them to the largely impotent, makeshift, regional party they were from the Civil War all the way to the Great Depression.
    That string of unrelenting electoral catastrophes should have tipped us off that there was something deeply, alarmingly wrong at the core of the party. Losses of that magnitude, over that period of time, are like a bright red dashboard light you’ve never noticed before that suddenly starts flashing insistently. Accompanied by a shrill beeping sound. And a voice repeating, “Warning, warning!” And a plume of smoke pouring from under your hood.
    Yet the party elites drove blithely on, chatting on their cell phones about their demographic advantages and the imminent demise of the Republican Party, until the air bags had deployed, the steering wheel had come off in their hands, and the rims of their tireless wheels were grinding sparks off the curbside. At this point, there’s no retooling this burnt-out Chevy Cruze into a vehicle still capable of going coast-to-coast.



    This letter is not intended as one more postmortem on what went wrong: on how the media should have done a better job, or how Hillary Clinton was a bad, bad, terribly bad candidate, the worstest candidate that ever was. Granted, it was Clintonism as a political philosophy, as practiced not only by both Clintons but also by President Obama and many others, that put the final stake in the heart of the Democratic Party as a national entity. The Clintonist project of taking the oldest and most diverse political coalition on earth—one organized around liberal economic principles that had held it together for generations—and re-centering it around conservative economic ideas and a hodgepodge of social ideas that nobody could agree on, was probably the worst political move since the Republicans tried to pretend in 1932 that the Great Depression was already over. (WASN’T THE DEPRESSION TERRIBLE? read their billboards lining the rail tracks between New York City and Washington, D.C.) It seems clear now that only the personal integrity, wit, eloquence, and thoroughly lovable family of Barack Obama kept the Democratic Party stumbling along, gut-shot, for this long.
    Throughout much of the country, particularly anywhere outside a city in your Trump States, the Democratic Party barely exists anymore—and there’s not a damned thing we can do about it, at least for the moment. It will take decades of patient work and deep investment to rebuild the party and reassert its dominance in state legislatures. Richard Mellon Scaife and the Koch brothers and ALEC and other right-wing pioneers spent years in the conservative wilderness before they were able to cement their control of the nation’s political apparatus. And the demographic shifts that Democrats so patiently—and foolishly—counted on to change everything will now be stalled and undermined at every turn. A few years of Republican border and refugee policies, and we’ll be headed back to the ever-whiter America that preceded Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 immigration reforms. The federal and state judiciaries—which, thanks to this election, Republicans will now fill with far-right ideologues—will rubber-stamp every one of the voter suppression tactics the GOP currently employs, along with any new devilry that Trump and his insurgents dream up. And once the president delivers on his campaign promise to Jerry Falwell Jr. and other evangelical leaders by making it legal for churches and other nonprofit organizations to funnel tax-deductible donations directly to political candidates, we can expect a fresh Niagara of cash to pour into our elections, one that will make Citizens United look like a dry crick during climate change.
    As it stands, your empire of Trump States now extends from Brownsville, Texas, to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan; from Coeur d’Alene to Key West. Future historians, if there are any, will be amazed to learn that just eight years after President Obama’s bailout of the auto industry—against the united and adamant opposition of the Republican Party—saved Michigan, Ohio, and maybe Pennsylvania from being reduced to large, smoking holes in the ground, all three of those once-blue holdouts voted to join Trump territory. Most of our country, at least as measured by physical terrain, has adopted your worldview. Your incessant self-pity and sense of injury on behalf of white people, and white people only. Your insistence that you remain the stronghold of “traditional values,” even as you adopt the most radical of ideas, and elect the most openly irreligious and irreverent president in our history. Your penchant for flushing any and every inconvenient truth down the memory hole of your favorite media complex, run by a gaggle of foreigners and cynics up in your hated New York.
    But let’s be clear: The problem isn’t that your guy won. It’s that he has made it obvious he intends to rule without any regard for the Constitution, let alone the majority of Americans who voted against him. When a sitting U.S. senator like Cory Booker can show up at Dulles Airport armed with an order from a federal judge to defend the rights of detained U.S. residents and be met with the equivalent of an airline flight attendant “buh-bye” from Customs officials, who now seem to consider themselves part of The Donald’s Praetorian Guard—well, it’s time to rethink our role in the government the president is creating in our name.

    So: What are we in Blue America going to do about it? What would it mean to remove ourselves as far as possible from the federal government?
    For starters, we now endorse cutting the federal income tax to the bone—maybe even doing the full Wesley Snipes and abolishing it altogether. We will raise our state and local taxes accordingly to pay for anything we might need or want. We ask nothing more from you and your federal government. Nothing for infrastructure, or housing, or the care of the poor and sick—not that you gave us much, anyway. All we want is our money, and you can keep yours, dollar for dollar.
    We now endorse cutting the federal income tax to the bone. All we want is our money, and you can keep yours, dollar for dollar.
    No more Obamacare? Hey, that hot mess was tricked out the way it was mostly to appease you in the first place. Since we have nearly all of the country’s leading hospitals, medical schools, and medical research institutes—and a much healthier population, one that’s happily short on automatic weapons—I’m sure we’ll come up with something better.
    Go ahead, keep on voting against your own economic interests to satisfy your need to control other people’s bodies, sex lives, and recreational habits. We’ll be creating cities and states that will defend gay marriage, a woman’s right to choose, and sensible gun control against your intrusive federal judiciary.
    Still think FEMA is some kind of liberal welfare scam? Poof—it’s gone! We will never again beg the people you elected to office to help us in the wake of what should have been considered national tragedies, such as September 11 and Hurricane Sandy. Meanwhile, best of luck with all those tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, forest fires, and—all new!—Oklahoma fracking-earthquakes you always seem to be having.
    What’s the matter with Kansas? Who cares! This is the good thing about a divorce—the chance to get all of your crazy, deadbeat in-laws out of the house. How can we save Detroit? Hey, she’s your baby now. Didn’t you say something about the private sector, or maybe casinos, or that mortgage loans guy who owns the Cleveland Cavaliers? I’m sure that’ll work out just fine for you.
    With all the extra money we’ll have, we can set up our own Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid systems once Paul Ryan manages to “privatize” them for you Trump Staters. And what city is all that privatized money likely to come to, on its way to the markets? Oh, right, New York, which you hate so much! All those extra Wall Street bonuses and dividends will really help the local economy.
    What’s more, as a quick glance at the electoral map will tell you, almost all of blue-state America is now concentrated in three contiguous clusters: the East Coast from Maine down through Virginia; the West Coast, along with Nevada and Hawaii; and the Rocky Mountain zone of Colorado and New Mexico. Disastrous as this allocation is when it comes to winning our country’s fatally antiquated Electoral College (is there another republic in the world, or indeed the history of the world, where a party has won a national election by nearly three million votes and still lost everything?), it’s perfect for developing highly efficient, cutting-edge regional networks in everything from transportation to clean energy to health care.



    Under the New Federalism, you won’t have to engage in political convolutions to try and reconcile your conservative ideology with your extortionate demands for yet another federal handout. Take Amtrak’s “Acela corridor,” which your commentators like to deride as the route along which we elitist liberals all supposedly live. Fact is, the Northeast Corridor is the only part of our national train system that makes an operating profit. But every year, your Trump State congressmen threaten to pull the plug on Amtrak unless it continues to guarantee daily, money-losing service to all the little towns out on the prairie, in empty, SUV-loving red states like Montana, Idaho, Nebraska, and Kansas. Then you go right back to fulminating about how much Amtrak costs. This is the legislative equivalent of Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles holding himself hostage at gunpoint to fend off a lynch mob.
    Go ahead, end your federal Amtrak subsidies. In their place, we will build fantastic, new high-speed rail systems of our own. They’ll run past our state-of-the-art wind farms, fiber-optic networks, and highways that recharge our self-driving cars as we travel. We also don’t want you to bother us about money to repair your Trump State airports since, as you always claim, we will just be flying over them anyway.
    There are still a few kinks to work out, of course. What to do, for instance, about the likes of Illinois and Minnesota, blue states adrift in a red sea? Or all those individual “blue cities” trapped in red states, like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, or Cleveland and Columbus? We’ll need to reach cooperative agreements with them to exchange goods and services as needed. They will become stops on our new information superhighways, or on our superfast rail networks, or self-driving highways. Our cool new trains and cars will glide past you all the faster, now that we don’t have to stop in between. Be sure to wave!
    A much weightier problem will be ridding ourselves of the Trump States within, our own rural counties full of angry right-wing voters, convinced that their money goes to support welfare queens in the cities even as their last, visible means of support crumble away. Considering how susceptible they are to fake news, one strategy might be to recruit those Russian hackers to create shiny new web sites extolling how wonderful things are in, say, West Virginia, or rural Arkansas. Perhaps, in a historic reversal, it’s time for a mass migration from urban North to rural South, of Trump voters flocking to Red America in search of a better life for themselves and their families.
    Whether you stay or go, we’ll be reaching out around the globe to recruit the most talented, intelligent, and ambitious individuals we can find to come to our America. Actually, we already do this, thanks to institutions from Silicon Valley to the University of Chicago, MIT to Wall Street, Hollywood to Broadway. Oh, and be forewarned: We will also be coming for your best and brightest in Red America, offering them free rides at many of the finest universities and research centers in the world. But don’t worry: You’ll still dominate college football!

    Your own Trump State secession from reality is likely to hurt us most in foreign policy, where reality has a way of coming back to bite you in the ass very quickly. Your avowed policies will not only fail to contain global climate change but will accelerate it irrevocably, which will be catastrophic. Under the New Federalism, our blue regions will at least be able to make their own preparations for the deluge. But separating ourselves from the rest of your dealings with the world will be more difficult.
    Since you want to quit policing the world and make everyone in Europe go back to defending themselves, we could easily cut the army to, say, the 125,000 soldiers we had just before the start of World War I, along with a much reduced air force and navy. And with a president who doesn’t feel he needs to take security briefings, and who genuinely does not seem to know why we don’t just go ahead and use our nuclear missiles, I think it’s safest to say, Ix-nay on the eapons-way.
    But since your Trump administration now boasts more generals than Pinochet’s junta, it’s likely that, isolationist noises aside, the White House will soon be up to its usual shenanigans around the globe. Who can say what these might be, in light of our new president’s one-man alliances with assorted global strongmen, autocrats, and wing nuts? Blue states and cities will do our best to publicly disassociate our America-within-America from whatever new international follies you people may be persuaded to embark upon. And we will continue to take to the streets to defend the rights of immigrants and refugees and anyone else threatened by your saber rattling and isolationism. To quote St. Augustine, “When there is no justice, what is the state but a robber band enlarged?” We respectfully decline to join the Trump-Putin robber band.



    I realize that this all sounds like a terribly pessimistic view of the future. It will leave behind millions of our fellow Americans most in need of the kind of assistance that only the federal government can provide—Americans whose only crime was to have the misfortune of resid-ing in a Trump State. I actually love Mississippi, an incredible place that, along with so much else, gave us Medgar Evers, William Faulkner, and Robert Johnson. I would love nothing better than to see Detroit, one of our greatest cities, restored to its former glory. But such hopes and dreams mean little now. The moment requires us to put aside, for now, the liberal ideal, which at its core was always about nurturing new shoots of enlightenment—which are as likely to spring up in a lonely farmhouse, or on a ghetto block, as at some great center of power or finance. The promise of liberalism was that we would never stop reaching out toward one another, always building and connecting, until all of America and the world was covered with diverse, democratic, and yes, brilliant societies, “the broad, sunlit uplands” that Churchill envisioned, or Dr. King’s “nation that will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.”
    Many of my fellow blue staters, of course, would prefer to persuade you to come around to our way of thinking. That is, after all, what elections are supposed to be about—instead of, say, suborning the head of the FBI, or getting foreigners to commit felonies on your behalf. It’s true that even the most dominant powers can be dissolved by the right idea, carried forward by enough people who believe in it. The national majority that Democrats enjoyed before the Civil War collapsed in the face of the demand for “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Land, and Free Men.” The Republican landslides of the 1920s were reversed nearly overnight when they ran up against the liberal program of the New Deal.
    Unfortunately, nothing like that is going to happen now. A political sea change takes place only when you can get people on the other side to come over. But you can only get them to switch if you can get them to listen to what you have to say, and you can only get them to listen if you share something resembling the same idea of objective reality. This is the bleakest new reality of all: That common ground is gone. You Trump Staters don’t read or listen to the same news sources we do. You don’t even care what a legitimate news source is, as the rise of all those fake news sites has demonstrated. Two-thirds of you believe that unemployment rose under Obama, even though he actually cut it by more than half; just 17 percent of you acknowledge that Obamacare has driven the percentage of Americans without health insurance to a record low. Exactly what is the messaging strategy to win over those of you willing to believe that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta are running a secret child-sex-slave ring out of a Washington pizza parlor? Or that President Obama is a secret Kenyan? Or that a routine military training exercise is a UN attempt to conquer Texas? Or any of the other bizarre and inane conspiracy theories that are now promulgated daily as the gospel truth not just by a few, fringe elements but by leading members of our new government’s security apparatus?

    This, sadly, is not a time for connecting or reaching out. It is a time for retrenchment and rebuilding. If we in the blue states want to make America great again, we must first demonstrate that we can make our own states into models of civic participation and economic equality.
    America’s original liberal, Louis Brandeis, famously advocated for the role of the individual states as “laboratories of democracy.” And so they have proven to be, with nearly all of our great reforms first attempted on the state or local level: the abolition of slavery (Massachusetts, 1783); the right of women to vote (Wyoming Territory, 1869); the regulation of workplace safety (Illinois in the 1890s and New York in the 1910s). A ban on monopolies was written into the constitution of Texas when it was still an independent republic in 1845, and converted into one of the first state antitrust acts in 1889—a statute that checked the power of that rapacious Eastern corporation Standard Oil, and helped set off a Texas oil boom. “The Wisconsin idea,” advocated by Robert La Follette in the first decades of the twentieth century, was that public universities should devote themselves to research improving the lives of the people in the states that sponsor them. New York State’s seminal Ives-Quinn Act of 1945 banned discrimination in employment on the basis of race, creed, color, or national origin. And so it goes, all the way down to the health care reform law in Massachusetts in 2006, which was the model for Obamacare whether Mitt Romney wants to admit it or not.
    Originally, all of these great steps forward were seen as outliers, as dangerous or risky, as harebrained social experiments. All wound up transforming our nation for the better—and all are models for the hard work we must do, in countless places, and in the face of massive opposition. Every time and place in our nation’s history has known people of noble mind, with advanced ideas and dreams. This is a good thing, but it availed us nothing if they could not bring those ideas and dreams to practical application.
    Brandeis himself formulated what should become the catchphrase for our own time. Appropriately unimpressed during a previous mania for a certain corrupt eastern empire, he asked: “Why visit Russia when you can go to Denmark?” Brandeis knew something about the challenges of putting liberal ideals into practice. In his time, he faced combinations of the money power and the political machines that were just as puffed up with their own arrogance and ignorance as so many of you are in the Trump States today. They would not hear him then, just as you will not hear us now. What Brandeis devised, along with Florence Kelley, a leader of the National Consumers League, was “the Brandeis Brief,” a revolutionary legal instrument that opened up the courtroom to the real world. It stressed actual social conditions and proven scientific realities over detached and absolute legal theories. Employed first to limit how many hours a day women could be forced to work in a laundry, it would eventually be used as a legal foundation for Brown v. Board of Education, along with countless other groundbreaking cases through the years. But that was the past.
    It is a tragedy that so much of the work to make this a better country, and a better world, has been thrown away, leaving us all in such needless peril.
    It is a tragedy that so much of the work that so many men and women toiled at for so long to make this a better country, and a better world, has been thrown away, leaving us all in such needless peril. To fall to this place, with this hollow man assuming the leadership of the world’s greatest republic, may be in itself a refutation of the greater liberal hope that sustained human progress is possible and will prevail. But all that remains for us is to regroup, to salvage what we might, and to begin again where we can.
    This is why our separation in all but name is necessary. There is only one way that we can counter all of your fantasies about what this man you have elected is, and what he—or the assorted moneyed interests, ideological fanatics, and foreign dictators he so fecklessly shields—will do for you. Since those of you in the Trump States will not listen to us, or to anything that smacks of rationality, we will have to create new facts on the ground—“alternative facts,” as you folks have taken to saying. Since you will not hear our words, we will need to convince you by our actions. We will need to run our states and our cities so well, in such an effective and enlightened manner, that we can make you understand all over again what every page of our history should already tell you. Through our own example, we must win you over, American by American, town by town, state by state, until we are once more in a position to mitigate all of the foolish, cruel, and wasteful things you are about to inflict on the rest of us, and to move forward once again, as American states united.
    Yours,
    A Blue State Patriot
    They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
    “As a general rule, the earlier you recognize someone is trying to kill you, the better off you’ll be.”

    "You think a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a sheet of glass."



  10. #390
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    They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
    “As a general rule, the earlier you recognize someone is trying to kill you, the better off you’ll be.”

    "You think a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a sheet of glass."



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