Democracy is about to be tested to its very core

Trump has laid down a marker for how the midterm elections are going to be fought and it's time to buckle up, because it will make 2020 look like a walk in the park.

In the interest of truth, I subjected myself to Trump’s fantasy bedtime story in full. Who needs sleeping tablets when you can watch such a meaningful contribution to the prevention of insomnia from the alleged most powerful man on earth? True to form, he butchered the English language while wrapping microscopic particles of truth in a blanket of lies and disinformation. It was like watching Billy Liar’s greatest hits. The clear takeaway from this cost-free campaign propaganda is that the US is about to enter its banana republic phase as we approach the midterm elections, which he is clearly terrified of.

I have to say, and I know I’ll be criticised for saying this, but Democrats MUST take some responsibility for where we find ourselves in this moment too. Their inability to deliver a clear and coherent proposition in November 2024 left the fate of the American people in the hands of a convicted criminal and pathological liar. A man who stole from his own charity, was guilty of operating a scam University, and is an adjudicated rapist. That’s before we discuss his systemic tax evasion and false accounting. How can a so-called party calling itself the champion of democracy lose an election to a tax-avoiding criminal rapist who can’t string a sentence together, or open his mouth without spewing a bucketful of lies? Make it make sense.

Democrats lost because the American people no longer trusted them and decided to elect a criminal. Now call me old-fashioned, but that’s a pretty damning indictment of a party that allegedly represents the interests of hard-working everyday Americans. The problem is that the Democratic Party, like it or not, is the only game in town, and its inability to address its own glaring failings is why we are all sitting here terrified about whether we will be subjected to another two years of this debilitating tyranny. It’s an indictment of a party for which vision, ambition and the audacity of hope left the building over a decade ago.

I have no horse in this race, so why do I care? I care because this is not just about America; this has now become a global problem. The Democrats haven’t just failed the American people; they have failed the world, and that’s a pretty harsh statement, I know, but sometimes the truth is painful. Someone has to tell these uncomfortable truths, because if they don’t, we will just get more of the same old ineffective government that can get nothing done. It will just be another term of special interests holding the legislative process hostage, aided by a Vichy legislative branch. If Democratic voters are blind to this truth, nothing will ever change, I’m sad to say.

This is a moment of existential threat that mirrors what Democrats were blind to in 2024, when they thought they could convince the American people to buy into Joe Biden, a man they knew was unfit to run for a second term. Only when he suffered a catastrophic cognitive collapse, live in front of millions, did they change path at the very last moment and offer up an alternative candidate that, had there been a primary process, would likely not have been the nominee.

Now, before everyone jumps on me for saying this, ask yourself honestly if I’m right. Having said that, I think Kamala Harris did a phenomenal job given the hand she was dealt, and once that decision had been made, I threw my heart and soul into supporting her campaign, which is well documented. Does it change what I’ve just said? Absolutely not, and it has nothing to do with her being a woman or a person of colour either; there were better choices, but the failure of the party to tell the truth about Joe Biden’s fitness to run was an unforgivable unforced error which led to the tyranny the world is being forced to endure in this moment as a result.

It would be absolutely correct to say there is no point in looking back, and that, to some degree, makes sense, but if you refuse to learn from errors of the past, I’m afraid you are destined to make the same mistakes again. Democrats made no apology to the American people for having failed them in 2024 with a campaign of vote for us because the other guy is a fascist. Instead, leadership hid away, blaming the American people for the mess the country found itself in. They did NOTHING for the best part of six months, sipping their mocha lattes, feeling sorry for themselves while basking in their intellectual superiority. If only they had used it to LISTEN!

Even now, they are sitting around waiting for Trump to set himself on fire so they can move into his charred seat on the gravy train and deliver more of the same tinkering at the edges nonsense, while doing the bidding of their corporate donors. A change of power should not be about throwing a new suit over the same old tired ideas. It should be an earthquake that destroys the foundations of political power that has been consistently failing the American people for decades. It’s time to tear up this script of mediocrity and reimagine America to serve the many, not the few. I am fucking sick and tired of listening to this ‘don’t rock the boat’ mentality. It’s time to jump in the lifeboats, sink the ship and create a better world for our children and our children’s children.

I’m happy to take off the gloves and have this fight no matter what the cost or the criticism. I simply DO NOT accept that this is the world everyday Americans want to live in, where a single medical event can bankrupt a family and destroy their future. Say it with me: ‘IT’S NOT ACCEPTABLE, AND IT WILL NOT BE TOLERATED’. When the Nazi’s herded the jews into the gas chambers, racial and political dogma drove them to empty canisters of Zyklon B into the ventilation vents. 6 million Jews died in that crime against humanity, and the world said ‘Never again’.

From the holocaust was born the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, yet less than a century later, the descendants of the victims of those war crimes have no problem committing genocide themselves, using the memories of Nazi war crimes as a free pass to murder tens of thousands of women and children. The true crime comes from the deafening silence of Western governments, which, by their silence, have become complicit in those crimes.

How strange is it that the Nazis actually murdered 11 million people in the camps, including captive Russian prisoners, Poles, Slavs, political prisoners Gypsies and the disabled. It seems somehow they don’t count in the world of Benjamin Netanyahu in his quest to realise ‘Greater Israel.’ I’m tired of it, tired of the selective outrage and victimhood woven around a preposterous ‘self-defence’ narrative. It’s not self-defence to plant cluster munitions disguised as footballs to kill young Palestinian boys. It’s not self-defence to deliberately target hospitals and leave babies to die in maternity wards after forced evacuations. For God’s sake, what does it take to call these people what they are: MONSTERS!

In this new world in which we are being held hostage by greed, division, and liars, truth is no longer the truth; it’s what those in power want it to be. Critical thinking is the enemy, and compliance is the new patriotism. By playing along, we have become complicit in our own march to economic slavery. We have become willing victims of our own demise, at the mercy of those at the top of the economic food chain. Predators who are, as we speak, making their plans to embark upon a holocaust of human labour, as jobs are exterminated and handed to robots and AI. Theirs is a ‘final solution’ that throws the workforce under the bus, just as Reagan did when jobs were shipped to China.

I can no longer hold in the rage I feel inside and the fear I have for the future of my children and my grandchildren. We CAN, and we have to change the trajectory of our political discourse. I’m sick of forever being restrained and reasonable in my approach to articulating the truth. When I leave this earth, I don’t want to do so having not said what I should have said, because if we concede ground to these monsters, future generations will never forgive us for our abject failure to stand up for them, as did those who fought fascism in World War II.

What Trump did yesterday was not a spur-of-the-moment thing; it was part of a carefully planned strategy that will deliver voter suppression on a whole new level. We will see the deployment of ICE and possibly the US military to intimidate voters at polling places in November. Election workers will be intimidated, and mail-in voting and the student vote will be targeted. Rest assured, if you are caught in possession of a black or brown face, you will face a level of intimidation that resembles the days of Jim Crow. Yesterday, Trump laid down a marker for an all-of-government assault on the voting process.

The icing on the cake for him would be getting the Save America Act passed, and Mike Johnson is trying everything he can to get this done now under reconciliation. While the Senate Parliamentarian should thwart his attempts, given it is not budget-related, prepare for revisions to make a round peg fit a square hole.

It will, of course, go much further than that, because even if he’s unable to sway the election as is his aim, the only result he is prepared to accept is one where Republicans win; anything else will be contested in a long, drawn-out legal fight designed to use the court system to delay handing over the gavel to Democrats if they carry the House. If you thought the 2020 election was a stress test for the guardrails, it will be small change compared to what’s about to take place in November.

Returning to the Democrats, as I stated earlier, there are no other options, so the choice is a simple either-or, and that is why I find it unconscionable that the Democratic leadership think so little of the American people that they have put forward no proposition to the country to reassure them that they are listening to what the democratic base are screaming when it comes to giving people hope. In my mind, it is reprehensible to relentlessly send out begging emails for money. Money to fund what I ask? Because aside from the small number of people focused candidates, all I hear is more of the same bullshit they have been feeding the base and delivering to voters for decades.

I am, at my very core, a political progressive and have been all my life. As a European, I can tell you that what the Democratic establishment is serving up on their menu is as transformative as a damp cloth, and that would be an insult to damp cloths. This is not a Democratic base problem; they are absolutely in tune with the people of America. Once you have reached the point where you aren’t prepared to stand up and say healthcare should be a human right, as should a living wage, you are lost in the wilderness in search of a spine. Allowing people to put up a pride flag, as important as that might be, does NOT pay people’s bills; a living wage does. It’s time to stop fucking around and get stuff done.

To do that, you have to get elected and to get elected, you don’t vote to give more bombs to Israel to commit genocide, nor do you enrich yourself through stock trading based on inside information. I find it difficult to even begin to articulate how angry I feel, and I do apologise for the profanity that has punctuated this piece, but I’m incandescent with rage, not for me but for the thousands of Democratic activists who pound the streets every day speaking to voters and raising money for strong committed candidates that DO want to make a difference. These people are the beating heart of democracy in America, and they deserve MUCH better than they are receiving from their own leadership, which engages every day in selective deafness as they defend their indefensible lack of judgement and the debt they owe to every activist fighting this war in the trenches, not from the comfort of an office in Washington.

If Democrats don’t win BIG, it won’t affect them; they will still have their reserved seats on the gravy train while the bottom 90% of America are left out in the cold AGAIN. I simply can’t continue because if I do, I may well write something I later regret; that’s how angry I am. I’ll be back on Monday because I’m doing some consultancy work over the weekend to help fund what I do here.

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