Morning Message 1.9

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Hey everyone, I’m your ridiculously photogenic host John Henry and this is the Morning Message!

This person is not your friend. This person is someone who is seeding arguments against the left while pretending to be ON the left, agitating for unnecessary and cruel compromises that leave millions of Americans in the lurch in the name of “bipartisanship.”

From a progressive perspective there is no reason for a “deal” because we’re not putting anything remotely radical or controversial on the table (aside from the saccharine controversy stirred up by the fascists).

If the power core of the Democratic Party had your best interests in mind they’d be fighting tooth and nail for everything we need – student loan forgiveness, publicly funded health care and higher education, hell put a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage as the top line in the budget just so the GOP has to waste time arguing about that and the rest of it goes through unchallenged. There is ZERO reason to compromise with the fascists here, other than that power core’s unwillingness to push for the spending we actually need.

This tweet is from someone trying to gaslight the progressive left out of pushing for substantive reform and improvement of our systems. Whether they know that’s what they’re doing is not relevant. It’s what they’re doing. Call them out and don’t let them normalize the idea that effective social programs are a “pipe dream.”

Fascist Followup

Over the weekend I published a new article at Medium (disclosure – I may make a few cents from people reading it, but it’s not paywalled) which provides a broad, survey-level examination of a huge network of anti-western social media and web pages trolling super-hard for traffic in a variety of ways targeting folks who may be particularly vulnerable to disinformation and manipulation including boomers and US military personnel and their families with fascist propaganda.

I’ve now followed up on that “officially” by doing what I could to get it in front of the face of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. We’ll see what they do with it.

My approach would be to rip the mask off the whole thing and now let’s sit down and talk about why Americans are so extraordinarily vulnerable to fascist propaganda, and do something to address that problem directly with the American people…and I mean like a two-hour network broadcast interruption for a national class on information literacy followed by an all-out comprehensive initiative to inoculate the American people against the viruses of hate and autocracy just as we do against any others…and expecting, of course, the same pushback from the same tragically benighted folks who refuse to vaccinate or mask up in response to Covid.

Remember, folks: just because they’re wearing your colors or look like you doesn’t mean they’re on your team.