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Category: politics
All things political, great and small.
Take Action: There’s nothing OK about the idea of a Muslim registry
My colleague Khadija at MomsRising asks how we will explain this to our kids. How can I tell my son, who only has a dawning understanding of how our nation was founded on the principle of religious freedom, that our own government is preparing to single out people based on their faith or ethnicity and take away their rights?
As a Jewish family we are even more profoundly aware of how dangerous this kind of thinking is. The racist, anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim fervor that has been inspired and embraced by Donald Trump is more than reminiscent of Weimar Germany when Hitler was able to step in to a leadership vacuum and wasn’t taken seriously by the people who thought he was crazy until it was much too late.
Keep Pounding: how grassroots organizing and popular protest defeated NC’s bathroom governor
Analysis from Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling on how Pat McCrory shoved through unpopular policies (including but very definitely not limited to HB2) and then wasn’t able to hide from the people thanks to the Moral Monday protest movement!
Pushing back hard on McCrory worked. The seeds of his final defeat today were very much planted in the summer of 2013. And it’s a lesson for progressives in dealing with Trump. Push back hard from day one. Be visible. Capture the public’s attention, no matter what you have to do to do it. Don’t count on the media to do it itself because the media will let you down. The protesters in North Carolina, by making news in their own right week after week after week, forced sustained coverage of what was going on in Raleigh. And even though it was certainly a long game, with plenty more frustration in between, those efforts led to change at the polls 42 months after they really started.
Keep Pounding.
Source: Why Pat McCrory Lost and What It Means in Trump’s America – Public Policy Polling
“Aberrations”
So many import and disturbing updates in Micah Sifry’s latest First Post at Civicist: Aberrations.
This point from Evan Osnos in The New Yorker probably freaked me out the most:
“Since Election Day, Trump has largely avoided receiving intelligence briefings, either because he doesn’t think it’s important that he receive them or because he just doesn’t care about them. George W. Bush, in the first months of 2001, ignored warnings about Osama bin Laden. Only in our darkest imaginings can we wonder what warnings Trump is ignoring now.”
Also, I learned a new word “Americanism.”
The Real Voter Fraud: How Trump Used Facebook to Suppress Voting
This is the story of how the Trump campaign used data to target African Americans and young women with $150 million dollars of Facebook and Instagram advertisements in the final weeks of the election, quietly launching the most successful digital voter suppression operation in American history.
Throughout the campaign, President-Elect Donald J. Trump shrewdly invested in Facebook advertisements to reach his supporters and raise campaign donations. Facing a short-fall of momentum and voter support in the polls, the Trump campaign deployed its custom database, named Project Alamo, containing detailed identity profiles on 220 million people in America.
With Project Alamo as ammunition, the Trump digital operations team covertly executed a massive digital last-stand strategy using targeted Facebook ads to ‘discourage’ Hillary Clinton supporters from voting. The Trump campaign poured money and resources into political advertisements on Facebook, Instagram, the Facebook Audience Network, and Facebook data-broker partners.
Life at the intersection of hate: 2016-???
Great blog post by my coworker Nadia Hussain on standing strong for her family in Trump’s America.
My family now lies at the intersection of hate — hatred of people of Latin/Hispanic background — like my husband, of Muslims like me, of my young son, who is both. The President-elect campaigned on the backs of my family by making sure people fear us. He calls Mexicans rapists and wants to deport 11 million mostly Latino undocumented people and build a wall.
Handy “Swamp-o-Meter” helps us follow Trump’s efforts to destroy the U.S. government
Trump Transition Tracker is “Your digital guide for resisting Trump.”
Support the protesters that are supporting the earth for all of us! #NoDAPL
The camps that are leading the resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline need your support. There are numerous different camps that exist at Standing Rock. Each serving a different role and responsibility. We know that it can be confusing as to who to support. So please take a moment to read about each camp we have listed and donate or send supplies!
A Minority President
George Lakoff is a linguistics professor and my favorite explainer of political values and communication strategy. Last week he wrote a great summary of where we are now.
Read: A Minority President: Why the Polls Failed, And What the Majority Can Do
Annals of Normalization
My friend and mentor Micah Sifry wrote Annals of Normalization: The Trump-Times Meeting about the very real danger of normalizing Trump’s presidency, highlighting how The New York Times is literally incapable of reporting on him accurately.
So, in the first 15 minutes of Trump’s meeting with the Times’ top brass, he offers a completely unrehearsed word salad, reminiscing about things that didn’t happen. And then the meeting continues without anyone blinking and saying, excuse me sir, nothing you just said makes any sense.
This is Trump’s reality distortion field. And even on their home turf, surrounded by colleagues, no one at the Times had the gumption to really puncture it.