On This Memorial Day Weekend America Needs A New Birth Of Freedom

Anderson Clayton Joins Us Live At 12:15pm ET - Will Be A Good Way To End A Hard Week

Happy Friday all. Looking forward to a long weekend of Nats baseball, beautiful spring weather, gardening and hanging out with family. Hope you get some rest this weekend. We all need it……

We end this week with a great event today at 12:15pm ET as North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton joins us live. You can join the event by clicking on this link at 12:15pm. Those of you who have enabled “Live” notifications should receive an email around then too. Either way works.

With Allison Riggs newly sworn in as a North Carolina Supreme Court Justice (great work everyone!) we are going to reflect on the strong year NC Dems had in 2024, talk about how Trump is playing in the Tar Heel State and look ahead to 2026. For those who can’t make it live today we will be sharing a recording here later this afternoon.

Here is how the Raleigh News and Observer is playing the passage of the reconciliation bill this morning in a story, House bill puts hundreds of thousands in NC at risk of losing health insurance:

If a bill passed by House Republicans early Thursday morning becomes law, more than 260,000 people in North Carolina are expected to lose Medicaid coverage, according to KFF, a national nonprofit focused on health care policy.

Children, pregnant women, some elderly individuals and people with disabilities can benefit from Medicaid coverage.

That comes as tax credits from the Affordable Care Act are set to expire, bringing the number of North Carolinians who could lose health care coverage to more than 470,000.

See folks today at 12:15pm. And use the link above to invite others - the more the merrier!

Writing To Thank President Biden, And Wish Him Well In Battle Against Cancer - From Hopium community member Karen P:

I just wrote a heartfelt card of best wishes and gratitude for President Joe Biden and will mail it today to the Biden Institute. I called them to ensure Joe would get the card if mailed to that address, and they confirmed that he would.

President Joe Biden

The Biden Institute

44 Kent Way

Newark, DE 19716

I encourage all members of our community to follow Karen’s lead and send Joe a note of gratitude and well wishes in the days ahead. Let’s rally for Joe!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Trump = Blinding Greed, Ruinous Sabotage, Unprecedented Betrayal, Undeniable Madness - So, as if the markets were not worried enough about the terrible tariffs and rancid reconciliation bill, our mad leader woke up this morning and decided to threaten a full scale, catastrophic trade war with Europe; and for shits and giggles, tax iPhone imports too:

Imagine believing that you had the power to make this decision, all by yourself, with no consultation with Congress, no law passed. Yes, one man, Trump, gets to decide how Apple conducts its business. Not the Apple board, not the CEO, not the customers, Trump. He is, politely, a fucking madman.

Harvard sued the Trump Administration this morning to block its fascistic ban of international students from the university (gift link):

Harvard University sued the Trump administration for a second time on Friday, less than 24 hours after the Department of Homeland Security said it would block international students from attending the nation’s oldest university and one of its most prestigious.

The lawsuit, and a letter issued by Dr. Alan M. Garber, Harvard’s president, signified a dramatic escalation of the battle between the administration and Harvard. And the university’s forceful and almost immediate response served as evidence that stopping the flow of international students to Harvard, which draws some of the world’s top scholars, would destabilize Harvard’s very existence.

“We condemn this unlawful and unwarranted action,” Dr. Garber said in a letter to the Harvard community. “It imperils the futures of thousands of students and scholars across Harvard and serves as a warning to countless others at colleges and universities throughout the country who have come to America to pursue their education and fulfill their dreams.”

The lawsuit followed an announcement on Thursday that Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification had been revoked, halting the university’s ability to enroll international students. The university indicated that it would also be filing a request for a temporary restraining order asking a judge to immediately block implementation of the administration action.

In the lawsuit, the university accused the Trump administration of exerting “clear retaliation for Harvard exercising its First Amendment rights to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum and the ‘ideology’ of its faculty and students.”

“With the stroke of a pen, the government has sought to erase a quarter of Harvard’s student body, international students who contribute significantly to the university and its mission,” the lawsuit said. “Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard.”

Yes, my friends, we learned this week that team Trump intends to make America healthy again by cutting Medicare and Medicaid, closing hospitals, stripping tens of millions of health insurance, gutting NIH, slashing Medical research at our universities, making our air and water dirtier, and undermining the greatest public health achievement of the past 100 years - our national vaccine regime.

While we need to rest up this weekend we need to come back next Tuesday angry, really angry, and ready to go to work.

A New Birth Of Freedom - May the remarkable words from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address inspire us this Memorial Day weekend:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Lincoln Memorial - May 11, 2025

For your long weekend viewing, listening and reading pleasure (or perhaps more appropriately, edification):

On Trump’s Ruinous Economic Agenda

• Fighting Trump’s Agenda Of Sabotage, Blinding Greed and Betrayal - my new video and post about the current moment

• Slower Growth, Higher Prices, A Huge Tax Hike, Explosive Deficits, Credit Downgrades - more on Trump’s ruinous economic agenda

• My interview with Dr. Rob Shapiro, and his new Washington Monthly article, Trump’s Perfect Storm That Could Sink The American Economy

• Great primers on why Trump’s economic agenda is so destructive from Rep. Tom Suozzi and Rep. Haley Stevens

Other Timely Hopium Fare

• Dr. Michal Mann On Trump’s Attack on Science, Knowledge and Our Public Health (this is a must watch interview)

• Amy Spitalnick On Trump’s Use Of “Antisemitism” To Censor Speech and Assault Higher Education in America

• Jane Kleeb On Modernizing The DNC And State Democratic Parties

• David Jolly on Putting Florida Back In Play

• NM AG Raúl Torrez on Putting Democracy First (this was a great discussion)

Let’s Get To Work! - So if you didn’t make calls yesterday strongly urge you to call your Republican Senators and Rep and tell them how outraged you are that the House reconciliation monstrosity, which is going to do so much harm to the country, has passed, and that you demand they vote against it either when it comes up in the Senate or in final passage later this summer.

If you have a Democratic House Member please call them and thank them for working so hard to kill this terrible bill. If you have a Democratic Senator, or two, please call them and demand they do everything they can to kill the Senate version. Here’s our working script. Use whatever works for you:

Here’s our working script. Use whatever works for you:

I am calling to urge you to vote against the reconciliation bill and to roll back Trump’s terrible and illegal tariffs. Together these actions have raised taxes on all of us and will explode the deficit - things Republicans have always told us they did not believe in.

But your agenda is also causing all of us to “pay more and get less” for every day things including our health care; people to loses their jobs; and the economy to slow - all so you can give your rich donors a huge tax break. Your plans will weaken this great country and are an extraordinary betrayal of everything you promised during the campaign - which was to help people like me, not Elon Musk, get ahead.

Your plans are ones of sabotage, surrender and betrayal and I urge you to abandon them and to work with Democrats to find a better way.

Please self-report on your actions today. I know folks have been working hard and these reports of our gritty fight helps lift all of us up every day.

Two more things you can do today to channel your outrage, anger and fear for what comes next for this once great nation:

1 - Help Abigail Spanberger Win Virginia - Simply, the Virginia elections are the most important elections we have this year, and we must win them. We have narrow majorities in both legislative chambers and while our candidate Abigail Spanberger has a modest lead in current polling, this is going to be a close election where our money and volunteer time can make a real difference. If you are to give to only one candidate or election this year it should be this one. Here’s a link to do so today……

To learn more about Abigail check out my new discussion with her, released yesterday. We have now raised over $107,000 towards our June 30th goal of $200,000 - thank you all. If you want to volunteer for her race head over to her campaign website today. We can do this people!

2 - Support The Hopium House 7 - We’ve begun our work to help flip the House next year by supporting and shoring up the 7 newly-elected battleground House Dems we helped elect last year. Catch our interviews with Reps Derek Tran, Janelle Bynum, Tom Suozzi and Laura Gillen and give to all 7 through a single donation on our ActBlue page. Learn more about this important effort here.

We’ve already raised over $96,000 towards our $200,000 June 30th goal - can we get to $100,000 today?

Keep working hard all. We have a country to save and the futures of our kids and grandkids to reclaim, together - Simon