Kash Patel wrote a trilogy of "children's books" about trump as king with himself as the wizard fighting against evildoers like Hillary Clinton. The first is entitled "The Plot Against the King. "A key player in uncovering one of our nations biggest injustices tells the whole story—for kids! Kash Patel partners with Beacon of Freedom Publishing House, an imprint of BRAVE Books, to bring a fantastical retelling of Hillary’s horrible plot against Trump to the whole family. Full of fake heralds and keeper Komey’s spying slugs, this is a story of daring and danger. But never fear! Kash the Distinguished Discoverer will win the day." Quote was from Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Plot-Against-King-Kash-Patel/dp/1955550123
Thank you Simon. Great to hear your update last night!
Self-subscriber update:
I wanted to share a website I have recently put together to help offset the chaos. At the beginning of the year, I started Daily Haiku for You: https://www.dailyhaikuforyou.com I add a daily haiku that offers hope and light in the midst of all this darkness and uncertainty. I'd love to share it with you who does SO much everyday for all of us with Hopium Chronicles. Please feel free to share it as well. With gratitude, Monica Boruch Washington DC
Monica, I subscribed to your Daily Haiku a week ago. I read it first thing every morning and it’s a beautiful way to start the day. Your haikus are wonderful! Thank you so much for this special daily gift. 💖
Thank you Punkette! I saw that you subscribed which makes me so happy. I'm glad you are enjoying them. Please spread the word! Our haiku community is growing.
This morning the five of us drafted our scripts to Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth for phone calls and follow-up contact form emails. In addition, my son (who worked for a Democrat in the Senate) in Madison is calling his Senators, Tammy Baldwin and even Ron Johnson. In the call to Ron Johnson he only spoke vocally about the layoffs at FAA (Federal Aviation Administration). With Tammy Baldwin he complained bitterly that Democrats are not speaking out loudly on a regular basis and fighting musk's DOGE group, an illegal, unqualified group of brownshirts lacking Congressional authorization and security clearance. I have an appointment but the other 4 in our group will attempt to reach both our Senators by phone as their schedules allow.
Also, my son is organizing his friends from Grad School (Masters in Public Policy) to do what we are doing. These friends live around the country. MA, MD, MI, MN, GA, CO, CA. They have families and jobs but I feel the network is expanding.
You can’t just copy and paste in to their contact forms. You have to type it out because they do not want comments written from “third party” apps such as Word. What I said was to put a “blanket hold” on all further nominations to DOJ until musk and his doge crew are indicted, arraigned, arrested, and put in jail. (Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz has done this with nominations for Department of State. It delays matters.) I said something like this, which I learned from a speech by Jamie Raskin: What trump/musk/vance are trying to do is a violation of Article 1 of the Constitution, the Impoundments Act of 1974, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act signed by Ronald Reagan in 1986. I know there are multi-state lawsuits underway but this situation is much too serious to wait for the lawsuits to make their way through the courts. There is a special prosecutor named Hampton Dellinger they are trying to get fired. (I learned this from Joyce Vance on Civil Discourse) Mr. Dellinger is appealing their attempt to fire him. He could take care of all the legal matters to fire them. Believe me, this effort takes a huge amount of time every morning.
Hampton Dellinger is from here in Chapel Hill NC, and a smart guy. His father Walther Dellinger was Solicitor General of the United States under Bill Clinton and later was a legal scholar who taught at Duke Univeristy School of Law.
I have been nagging my daughter all morning long (she came home from college to enjoy a rare snow day) and will now nag her every day to call our NC GOP senators. I love your son's description of the brownshirts! Accurate!
I know this is yesterday's news, but thanks much for the gift link to the WaPo Mexico article, Simon. For me, the following paragraph especially resonated:
"First, consistency is crucial. Day in and day out, Democrats need to highlight the lies and potential illegality of the president’s actions. Given the volume of the transgressions, this won’t be easy. But meticulously labeling every false statement as a lie matters — and not just for the historical record. Politics is about narratives and trust, and building both takes time."
Time and time again, we were told by the media and others that there was no point in calling Trump a liar, "everyone knows that," " that's already been litigated," "that's already baked in," blah blah blah BS.
YES, if all you do is say Trump is a liar, that won't get you anywhere, neither will keeping track of the number of falsehoods, as Stalin taught us long ago. It's too abstract; people just respond "all politicians lie." THAT *is* "already baked in."
And it's understandable that the media makes such excuses for why they have NEVER really fact-checked anything the guy has said, not once. Correct me if I'm wrong, please, but I think it's pretty clear they do for (at least) three reasons:
(1) He lies so much that if they really consistently fact-checked him all the time, all they would do every day is keep track and debunk--newsrooms have been so cut to the bone they don't have the bandwidth for this
(2) Since their corporate overlords slashed spending on investigative journalism in particular, "access" has become their primary value-add, and they rightly fear they'll lose it if they speak truth too doggedly to power
(3) Because digital capabilities *still* don't come naturally to them, they have never come up with a fact-checking format that's impactful (even though an obvious one's been staring them in the face for at least two decades). Instead they report on an event in one article, do a fact-check on it in another, a transcript in a third (like you'd have to do in print), and find nobody reads the transcript or the fact-check, so why make a real effort?
These are the reasons Trump was able to tell 600+ lies in 40 minutes of debate with Biden and have only 30 of them fact-checked by CNN, which tells readers that everything else the man said was true! Aaaargh! Better not to have "fact-checked' him *at all*--thanks for nothing, CNN.
So a fact I'd love to check with fellow Hopiates(?): it takes a *community* to fact-check Donald Trump, a community that doesn't care whether Trump will let them interview him or whether "Republicans read newspapers too," that doesn't have billions of dollars of other business with the government, a community made up of "ordinary" Americans (instantly more credible than the media) speaking in ordinary language people can relate to (and not above being at least occasionally entertaining and engaging, unlike Glenn Kessler, for example).
It would be *easy* for such a community to use common off-the-shelf platforms (which add authenticity) to accomplish two important goals where Trump’s dishonesty is concerned:
(1) Via transcripts annotated by "people like us," and put in front of friends by friends on a "thought you might find this interesting" basis (as opposed to one of a thousand possible paths in Choose Your Own Newspaper every day), get the following truth across to our more jaded friends, colleagues, neighbors, and others:
"No, no, no you don't *understand*; there's lying, there's LYING, and then there's Trump,"
And do so with an impact akin to what happens when someone makes the mistake of thinking it would be cool to see what it's like to be tackled by an NFL linebacker.
Trump may not be able to run a business, let alone a country, but holy cow, just like you'd never really understand how tall Michael Jordan is until/unless you're up close and personal (and will never grok just how breathtakingly effed 44.46's White House was/is unless you actually read at least one of the teil-alls in full, not just media excerpts and reviews of dozens), only people who have been baptized full body in the Trump cesspool of deceit and diarrhea of the mouth will be able to really appreciate the casual evil of his fabrications.
PS I'd call these annotated transcripts poligraphs (and doesn't Trump’s signature look exactly like a polygraph of someone who's lying his a** off?)
(2) Via off-the-shelf forum software with up-vote, down-vote capability, create a "ShillBoard 100" of Trump's worst lies. Community members seed it and do the upvotes and downvotes, but anyone in the general public can see what's on it (and can submit additional lies for the community to add)
Over time, everyone would learn the Trump lies that are furthest beyond the pale (the ones that are the equivalent of Stalin's individual deaths, a la the Tunisian fruit vendor who set himself on fire to kick off Arab Spring), the ones that can become the highly concrete focus of efforts to use his dishonesty to separate him from supporters (rather than just calling him a liar or picking out 2-3 lies that some consultant *thinks* are most likely to resonate), esp. since the community would pretty aggressively include swing voters who community members vouch for, RVATs, conservative Never Trumpers etc.
I'm betting his oath of office would end up high on the list, but personally the one that has stuck with me at the level of a blood libel was when he started telling supporters that 90% of COVID deaths weren't really COVID; they were all made up by doctors to get more money from the government. Dishonoring the memory of hundreds of thousands of dead Americans AND the medical professionals risking their lives to save them, all in one breath? Wow. Just wow. He earned the bigliest real estate in hell for that one, imnsho.
PS It's clearly also going to take a community to keep the public truly abreast and informed (without getting overwhelmed, lost, or glazed) about Thing 1 and Thing 2's latest efforts to destroy our country, and make sure everyone sees the ones that are most likely to rouse them to action (via customizable notifications, for example)
This reminds me of a saying adopted during GW Bush's horrid presidency, when it became clear that the Iraq War was totally predicated on deceit.
"Clinton lied, but nobody died"
You are 100% correct, that the general population thinks that all politicians lie, so that doesn't move the needle.
What moves the needle is when their lies lead to bad effects for the people. The key IMO is to amplify lies that has led to people's lives being negatively affected. Follow the template: What was the lie, why is it a lie, and how has it led to a harmful effect.
The Dems missed this opportunity badly in 2024 by not prosecuting his lies during COVID more thoroughly and frequently. He didn't just bungle the COVID response, he actively lied about it and made everything worse. COVID was going to be extremely problematic for any leader, but to intentionally lie about it constantly cost hundreds of thousands of lives and economic damage.
I totally agree, and this should be reflected in *any* community-based effort to call him out for his lies. There probably should be some visual element the community can use to regularly update the cost of each lie in money and/or lives (where applicable--of course, there are some lies that need to be called out even if we can't point to concrete consequences, just because they're despicable, outrageous, and corrosive, like the blood libel I mentioned, or his description of the traumatic brain injuries our soldiers received when Iran retaliated for his actions as "headaches").
Whatever gets created to do this could also be repurposed and applied elsewhere. There could be a Google Docs-based mini-platform called "Pardon Me," for example, that tracks, in close to real-time (daily or weekly), the fresh criminal activity of everyone he's pardoned, and for comparison, what people pardoned by other presidents have done.
The subhead of the mini-platform could be Lawlessness & Disorder, and open with two "summary graphics" regularly updated by the community:
*One graphic would represent subsequent crimes by pardonees of each president as waves of relative size (and soon be captioned the Trump crime wave (with him in a Speedo on a surfboard riding his yuge red/orange algae-laden wave), because I guarantee his wave will be a tsunami compared to the others
*The second one. created downstream as applicable, would be specifically focused on murders, as expressed in units of the victims he featured in his lurid campaign ads, because we can be sure that, for example, at least one of those J6ers is going to kill a whole bunch of Laken Rileys..
Beyond (and following) this, more static graphics and text could compare Trump’s year-by-year record on crime with the presidents before and after, as well as Dems vs Reps over time in general (I've already done this, and surprise, surprise, it nets out a lot like Simon's job creation comparison), include, by way of explanation, the data that shows Dems have kicked GOP a** on economic growth for almost a century now (QED less reason to commit crimes) as well as the data that proves that Dems, not Reps, are the ones "funding the police," and a map showing that all the states with the highest crime rates are red trifectas, etc.
All of which the dynamic new rap sheets for each administration's pardonees will help open users to receive.
It's probably one of the reasons this admin wants to pull their congressional appropriation. The Annenberg Public Policy Center provides this resource https://www.factcheck.org/Snopes.com is a good resource to query or submit your questions to be addressed. PolitiFact is another place to go for help sifting through information. Historically, the local Public Library is THE place to go and dependable librarians help you find information: today they have so much to offer to the public.
Finally, I'd say that we need to educate our children and adults to be able to use their own brains to critically evaluate information.
Hi Deborah. Thanks much for taking the time to read my comment and to post this response, which has compelled me to think through what I'm proposing more concretely and therefore (I hope) make a better case for why it will work. I'm familiar with all the orgs you mentioned, and agree they do a great job. But here's why I think more and different are needed:
* Literally hundreds of lies are being told every day that aren't being fact-checked at all--MAGA applies the same shock and awe strategy to the truth that it does to government, and just like our charge as a whole, it's going to take a community, not just the existing media and fact-checking ecosystem, to combat this.
* Every time a fact-check is done that focuses on merely a fraction of the lies told in a debate, speech, interview, “news” conference et al, the natural assumption of those who experienced that event, directly or indirectly, is that everything not called out was/is true. Especially given that, thanks to factchecking, every politician gets caught saying false and misleading things sometimes.
* As a result, there's no understanding or appreciation among most people of how much they believe to be true really isn't, nor an appreciation that there's a level of lying going on with Trump and MAGA that's orders of magnitude beyond the ordinary mendacity of politicians (and if you can't tell the difference between one lie and a thousand, then a thousand lies is what you'll get)
* It's one thing to hear that he lied 30,000 times (merely a Stalinesque statistic); it's another thing to read a transcript or watch a video and learn, concretely, that nearly every word out of his mouth is a lie, a Soviet level of lying. One of the things that hardened our antipathy to the USSR was our regular exposure to their propaganda about us, every word of which we knew was false because it was us they were talking about. Many people aren't developing that same antipathy about Trump because the vast majority of his lies aren't told about things people know from personal experience aren't true, ie they aren't lies about them or their daily lives; they're lies about everything and everyone else.
* Ironically, lies about the average person and the average person's life are the kinds of lying (or, more charitably, obliviousness) associated with us eg when we tell people the economy is great, they say they're not feeling it, and we call them out as stupid and/or tell them airily that they are being “duped into voting against their own interests” (rather than telling them honestly why things aren't better, even if that means goring the ox of some of our big donors--who are now Trump’s). We've seen what that kind of hand-waving has done for support for us. I believe people could develop that level of antipathy for him if he was thoroughly fact-checked, using simple technologies like Google Docs to do so in the context of the flow of his actual words, either as they experienced them or could imagine experiencing them (eg while reading a transcript). That's when 30,000 lies becomes “my God, this mfer is lying to my face, and he's doing it endlessly, like he either thinks I'm a complete idiot, has no grip on my lived reality, or both.”
* There's actually a small proof of concept for this that Simon pointed out as one of the few bright spots in the aftermath of Biden's dismal debate performance, an Arizona focus group of Hispanic voters who voted 12-0 that Biden, not Trump, had won the debate. Why did they do this? Because they felt Trump did nothing but lie from start to finish. Why did they feel this way? Because Trump did what he did throughout the campaign, blame every problem our country has on immigrants so he could offer a simple solution to all our ills--deport them and use tariffs to punish the whole world for sending them. Problems all solved, no need for pointing fingers internally at the rich, no need to explain anything, (because “when you're explaining, you're losing"--Reagan). The Hispanic focus group turned on him because as immigrants themselves, they knew what he was saying was utter BS. People who aren't recent immigrants don't know that viscerally, so his lying didn't cost him (contd)
* MAGA has done a very effective job of convincing millions of people that all the traditional fact-checkers we both know are biased, an effort that worked, in my opinion, because of the nature of institution-building. As any institution is built, it forms, for the sake of consistency and efficiency, if nothing else, its own culture and language, which becomes increasingly distinct from the rest of the population. It therefore becomes easier and easier for people of bad faith to frame it as alien, other, not like us, and from there, frame it as elite and untrustworthy. Having a community of ordinary people doing fact-checks, everyone in their own untrained, unvarnished language, which is therefore much more the language of ordinary people, people like us, in an era where all expertise has become suspect, makes such fact-checks much more like something heard from a trusted neighbor or colleague, which should inoculate them better against the usual Trumpian attacks.
* What the ShillBoard 100 concept adds to this is something no fact-checker even attempts to do today: surface the worst, most egregious lies, the ones that really matter and can change minds about the man himself.
Thanks for calling out NJ, Simon! I truly believe that Kean Jr would have been ousted but for low voter turnout in 2024 and at least 2 people have already stepped up to challenge him in 2026.
In the meantime, have folks found credible sources for Medicare and Medicaid recipients by congressional district? I would love to send Kean Jr a letter with statistics about how many people in NJ-07 will be hurt by cuts to those services, but I don't feel great about the credibility of the sources I've found so far. (For context, the numbers seem too low to be accurate.)
Here is what I wrote to Senator Durbin. Then I edited the letter to Senator Duckworth by referring specifically to the layoffs at the FAA and within Health and Human Services. Letter to Durbin:
"As I am sure you are aware, many of us are deeply concerned about the future of our Democracy. We would really appreciate more frequent weekly or twice a week updates by newsletter of what Democrats in the Senate are doing to fight back against trump/musk/vance and their intent to shred our Constitution, as outlined in Project 2025.
Many of us here have been discussing what can be done to delay the terrible cabinet nominations and cuts to key agencies being implemented. The nominations are a threat to our national security, our economy, our right to privacy, and public health. The budget cuts also threaten our national security, economy, the right to privacy, and public health.
Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii has put a “blanket hold” on further nominations to the Department of State until funds for USAID are released. We are requesting that a blanket hold be placed on further nominations to the Department of Justice until musk and his DOGE crew are out of government for good, indicted, arraigned and jailed. They are unqualified, the agency has not been approved by Congress, and obviously none of them have gone through strict security clearances. Could this legal action be handled by Hampton Dellinger, the head of the Office of Special Counsel? I read the article about trump/musk trying to fire him and the appeal underway.
What trump/musk/vance are trying to do is a violation of Article 1 of the Constitution, the Impoundments Act of 1974, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act signed by Ronald Reagan in 1986. I know there are multi-state lawsuits underway but this situation is much too serious to wait for the lawsuits to make their way through the courts.
Thank you Simon -- you are very motivating and I am passing your message on to my networks. I love the comment about taking back the American flag -- let's all do that. I've mentioned before, not sure if in this forum, but I would love to see small groups of us (3-5 or 5-10 people) on street corners in our cities -- and all across the country -- maybe randomly, but on an ongoing basis, wrapped in the American flag as a shawl or banner, but also with signs that say: STOP THE COUP or CORRUPTION BEGETS CORRUPTION or WE DIDN'T ELECT ELON MUSK -- get our creative juices flowing and get visible, post photos of this action everywhere -- this could happen w/o creating a huge demonstration. Just a thought -- maybe Indivisible can help with that - I'm going to ask. :-)
Simon, thank you for last night's honest but optimistic talk. Called Kaine, Warner, and (yuck) Ben Cline. I'd like to encourage people to help out Virginia's Abby Spanberger. With the government layoffs affecting Virginia badly, we have a real chance to put a Democrat in Richmond and send the odious (batshit crazy) Winsome Sears back home.
This my first day as a Hopium subscriber. I live in Raskin's Maryland district and called him and Senator Van Hollen. Thanks first, concern about budget second. One daughter lives in PA-07. I called Mackenzie on her behalf, congratulating him on the budget priorities he outlined in January (child tax credit, child care tax credit increases), pointing out the problems with Trump's budget, and asking him to join the reps against the Trump budget - which include a fellow PA rep. I called 3 republican senatore, my second daughter lives in Cleveland OH, thanking them for not bringing Trump's budget to the floor, and pointing out the three major problems - tax cuts for billionaires / corporations, benefit cuts for working people via Medicaid and SNAP, and most important to me - exploding the deficit. In my calls, even to Republicans, I try to start with thanking them for whatever small thing I can find.
Please, everyone stop using the words "working people" in regards to the social safety net. I have an autistic son that can't work and you can't believe how hard I have to fight every blasted year to keep him on anything. For years while I was putting myself thru college I took care of profoundly disabled children and young adults. I wonder if in this day and age people would say( and I did hear this back then as well) just let them die. Heck, Trump has said that about his own disabled relative. And then there are the elderly- I can no longer work and I have to take shots twice a year that cost $5,000 each. Just about the total of my Social Security. I paid into these accounts to the government since I was 16. So, please drop the working.
Thanks for your clarification. I mistakenly used the phrase "working people" and will not again. My intention, now informed by your situation, was to stay away from the assumption that those on medicaid / SNAP are non-working by choice (e.g, lazy???), rather than to leave out the elderly / retired / disabled. I will drop "working" from my vocabulary. What phrase would you suggest to incorporate all groups? Middle class? Lower income?
I saw some fellow New Mexicans in the chat last night and would like to connect. I just signed up with Indivisible Albuquerque and plan to virtually attend its next meeting.
If you're interested, please message me here, and we can decide how to proceed from there.
On Feb. 9th she had a joint telephone event with NM AG Raúl Torrez to discuss litigation against the administration. (Listen to recording at https://www.facebook.com/share/v/18EKEbGVBP/)
Breshnahan is in my district, PA-08. I will do everything I can to pressure him and ultimately remove him, because he took the place of Matt Cartwright, a great man and honorable public servant. While it is good to see that he may vote against some of the lunacy, he needs to go. The problem we are running into in Pennsylvania is that a lot of these district offices are not staffed or are closed when people show up. This is particularly true of Dave McCormick, who should have NEVER beat Bob Casey, a true Pennsylvanian and public servant. McCormick is a Trump bootlicker who isn't even from this state. He's also a condescending billionaire a-hole, who doesn't give a damn about Pennsylvanians and their struggles. He's there to be a loyal Trump minion, do as little work as possible, and he keeps his offices closed to the public while he goes home to his mansion in Connecticut! I despise him. If there was a way to remove him before 2030, I'd be all for it. We're not real happy with Fetterman either, and I hope someone primaries him in 2028. It makes me sad to say so, but he is not who he was, and he has shifted on so many positions that he's nearly unrecognizable from the candidate we supported and voted for. Governor Shapiro is the only bright light we have right now! Our State AG is a Trumper, (Dave Sunday) which ticks me off as well, because he isn't joining any of the lawsuits that he should be--we need to oust him in 2028 too.
Can't remember what show I saw this on, but a farmer in Maine had bought into the federal program to reduce power usage and purchased $45,000 worth of solar and its installation. He has been waiting to be reimbursed. Guess that won't be happening now.
Farmers across the country should be contacted by the Dems in their state to see what their stories are since they will vary: farmers in California whose fields were flooded this January since Trump opened the aquifers in Northern California might not be able to get enough water to get them through the summer planting season now, those farmers affected by the non-payment of their USAID crops in the Midwest and I am sure there will be more. Farmers could be a very helpful source of new political voters for us if we start advocating/showing up for them in every state.
I think it is very important to describe what is actually in the minds of the people who are driving Trump. Simply, they want to return the USA to the period around the Gilded Age -- when taxes and regulations were at a minimum, and people depended on themselves rather than the government. What they want to be rid of is the government that started to get more active and powerful breaking up large monopolies -- and then grew even more during the Great Depression. They don't believe they are "destroying" the USA -- even though that result is possible.
Sad: Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. These people are living in a fantasy world. To Musk, this is all like Sim City.
Correct. These people want a return to the Gilded Age, when America was essentially run by oligarchs. As such, Musk & Trump et al find it natural to ally themselves with other countries run by oligarchs and autocrats, such as Russia, Hungary and Saudi Arabia.
But Karen makes an important point. What we are really witnessing right now is a Neo-Feudalist movement.
At least the robber barons threw society some crumbs by building libraries and the like. This bunch is total “fuck you hooray for me” anarcho-libertarians
Thank You. Time to get to work people. Simon has laid it out for us.
A Mad King!!
https://images.app.goo.gl/V5vLA3QHk3w3iHjc9
Kash Patel wrote a trilogy of "children's books" about trump as king with himself as the wizard fighting against evildoers like Hillary Clinton. The first is entitled "The Plot Against the King. "A key player in uncovering one of our nations biggest injustices tells the whole story—for kids! Kash Patel partners with Beacon of Freedom Publishing House, an imprint of BRAVE Books, to bring a fantastical retelling of Hillary’s horrible plot against Trump to the whole family. Full of fake heralds and keeper Komey’s spying slugs, this is a story of daring and danger. But never fear! Kash the Distinguished Discoverer will win the day." Quote was from Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Plot-Against-King-Kash-Patel/dp/1955550123
Here is what NPR had to say about it. https://www.npr.org/2024/12/09/nx-s1-5213692/kash-patel-conspiracy-theories-fbi
Kash is a big fan of QAnon and signs QAnon messages in his books to the kiddos. https://meidasnews.com/news/kash-patel-sold-childrens-books-inscribed-with-wwg1wga-qanon-slogan
He's probably getting Senate confirmation as trump's FBI Director right now.
Pretty reptilian of him!
Thank you Simon. Great to hear your update last night!
Self-subscriber update:
I wanted to share a website I have recently put together to help offset the chaos. At the beginning of the year, I started Daily Haiku for You: https://www.dailyhaikuforyou.com I add a daily haiku that offers hope and light in the midst of all this darkness and uncertainty. I'd love to share it with you who does SO much everyday for all of us with Hopium Chronicles. Please feel free to share it as well. With gratitude, Monica Boruch Washington DC
Monica, I subscribed to your Daily Haiku a week ago. I read it first thing every morning and it’s a beautiful way to start the day. Your haikus are wonderful! Thank you so much for this special daily gift. 💖
Thank you Punkette! I saw that you subscribed which makes me so happy. I'm glad you are enjoying them. Please spread the word! Our haiku community is growing.
Thanks for the support....._:-)
Monica
💖💖💖 Thanks, Monica! I will continue to spread the word. Haikus Rule! 😀
Thank you Monica! What a valuable offering; I subscribed immediately. Today's haiku is lovely.
Thank you Cynthia. I hope you’ll come back for more. It’s helping me get through all the bad stuff a bit more. Monica
Oh good! Yes, I now see you subscribed!!
This morning the five of us drafted our scripts to Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth for phone calls and follow-up contact form emails. In addition, my son (who worked for a Democrat in the Senate) in Madison is calling his Senators, Tammy Baldwin and even Ron Johnson. In the call to Ron Johnson he only spoke vocally about the layoffs at FAA (Federal Aviation Administration). With Tammy Baldwin he complained bitterly that Democrats are not speaking out loudly on a regular basis and fighting musk's DOGE group, an illegal, unqualified group of brownshirts lacking Congressional authorization and security clearance. I have an appointment but the other 4 in our group will attempt to reach both our Senators by phone as their schedules allow.
Also, my son is organizing his friends from Grad School (Masters in Public Policy) to do what we are doing. These friends live around the country. MA, MD, MI, MN, GA, CO, CA. They have families and jobs but I feel the network is expanding.
Hi Linda: I live in Hyde Park, so would be grateful if you’d be willing to share your Durbin/Duckworth scripts!
You can’t just copy and paste in to their contact forms. You have to type it out because they do not want comments written from “third party” apps such as Word. What I said was to put a “blanket hold” on all further nominations to DOJ until musk and his doge crew are indicted, arraigned, arrested, and put in jail. (Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz has done this with nominations for Department of State. It delays matters.) I said something like this, which I learned from a speech by Jamie Raskin: What trump/musk/vance are trying to do is a violation of Article 1 of the Constitution, the Impoundments Act of 1974, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act signed by Ronald Reagan in 1986. I know there are multi-state lawsuits underway but this situation is much too serious to wait for the lawsuits to make their way through the courts. There is a special prosecutor named Hampton Dellinger they are trying to get fired. (I learned this from Joyce Vance on Civil Discourse) Mr. Dellinger is appealing their attempt to fire him. He could take care of all the legal matters to fire them. Believe me, this effort takes a huge amount of time every morning.
Hampton Dellinger is from here in Chapel Hill NC, and a smart guy. His father Walther Dellinger was Solicitor General of the United States under Bill Clinton and later was a legal scholar who taught at Duke Univeristy School of Law.
I have been nagging my daughter all morning long (she came home from college to enjoy a rare snow day) and will now nag her every day to call our NC GOP senators. I love your son's description of the brownshirts! Accurate!
I know this is yesterday's news, but thanks much for the gift link to the WaPo Mexico article, Simon. For me, the following paragraph especially resonated:
"First, consistency is crucial. Day in and day out, Democrats need to highlight the lies and potential illegality of the president’s actions. Given the volume of the transgressions, this won’t be easy. But meticulously labeling every false statement as a lie matters — and not just for the historical record. Politics is about narratives and trust, and building both takes time."
Time and time again, we were told by the media and others that there was no point in calling Trump a liar, "everyone knows that," " that's already been litigated," "that's already baked in," blah blah blah BS.
YES, if all you do is say Trump is a liar, that won't get you anywhere, neither will keeping track of the number of falsehoods, as Stalin taught us long ago. It's too abstract; people just respond "all politicians lie." THAT *is* "already baked in."
And it's understandable that the media makes such excuses for why they have NEVER really fact-checked anything the guy has said, not once. Correct me if I'm wrong, please, but I think it's pretty clear they do for (at least) three reasons:
(1) He lies so much that if they really consistently fact-checked him all the time, all they would do every day is keep track and debunk--newsrooms have been so cut to the bone they don't have the bandwidth for this
(2) Since their corporate overlords slashed spending on investigative journalism in particular, "access" has become their primary value-add, and they rightly fear they'll lose it if they speak truth too doggedly to power
(3) Because digital capabilities *still* don't come naturally to them, they have never come up with a fact-checking format that's impactful (even though an obvious one's been staring them in the face for at least two decades). Instead they report on an event in one article, do a fact-check on it in another, a transcript in a third (like you'd have to do in print), and find nobody reads the transcript or the fact-check, so why make a real effort?
These are the reasons Trump was able to tell 600+ lies in 40 minutes of debate with Biden and have only 30 of them fact-checked by CNN, which tells readers that everything else the man said was true! Aaaargh! Better not to have "fact-checked' him *at all*--thanks for nothing, CNN.
So a fact I'd love to check with fellow Hopiates(?): it takes a *community* to fact-check Donald Trump, a community that doesn't care whether Trump will let them interview him or whether "Republicans read newspapers too," that doesn't have billions of dollars of other business with the government, a community made up of "ordinary" Americans (instantly more credible than the media) speaking in ordinary language people can relate to (and not above being at least occasionally entertaining and engaging, unlike Glenn Kessler, for example).
It would be *easy* for such a community to use common off-the-shelf platforms (which add authenticity) to accomplish two important goals where Trump’s dishonesty is concerned:
(1) Via transcripts annotated by "people like us," and put in front of friends by friends on a "thought you might find this interesting" basis (as opposed to one of a thousand possible paths in Choose Your Own Newspaper every day), get the following truth across to our more jaded friends, colleagues, neighbors, and others:
"No, no, no you don't *understand*; there's lying, there's LYING, and then there's Trump,"
And do so with an impact akin to what happens when someone makes the mistake of thinking it would be cool to see what it's like to be tackled by an NFL linebacker.
Trump may not be able to run a business, let alone a country, but holy cow, just like you'd never really understand how tall Michael Jordan is until/unless you're up close and personal (and will never grok just how breathtakingly effed 44.46's White House was/is unless you actually read at least one of the teil-alls in full, not just media excerpts and reviews of dozens), only people who have been baptized full body in the Trump cesspool of deceit and diarrhea of the mouth will be able to really appreciate the casual evil of his fabrications.
PS I'd call these annotated transcripts poligraphs (and doesn't Trump’s signature look exactly like a polygraph of someone who's lying his a** off?)
(2) Via off-the-shelf forum software with up-vote, down-vote capability, create a "ShillBoard 100" of Trump's worst lies. Community members seed it and do the upvotes and downvotes, but anyone in the general public can see what's on it (and can submit additional lies for the community to add)
Over time, everyone would learn the Trump lies that are furthest beyond the pale (the ones that are the equivalent of Stalin's individual deaths, a la the Tunisian fruit vendor who set himself on fire to kick off Arab Spring), the ones that can become the highly concrete focus of efforts to use his dishonesty to separate him from supporters (rather than just calling him a liar or picking out 2-3 lies that some consultant *thinks* are most likely to resonate), esp. since the community would pretty aggressively include swing voters who community members vouch for, RVATs, conservative Never Trumpers etc.
I'm betting his oath of office would end up high on the list, but personally the one that has stuck with me at the level of a blood libel was when he started telling supporters that 90% of COVID deaths weren't really COVID; they were all made up by doctors to get more money from the government. Dishonoring the memory of hundreds of thousands of dead Americans AND the medical professionals risking their lives to save them, all in one breath? Wow. Just wow. He earned the bigliest real estate in hell for that one, imnsho.
PS It's clearly also going to take a community to keep the public truly abreast and informed (without getting overwhelmed, lost, or glazed) about Thing 1 and Thing 2's latest efforts to destroy our country, and make sure everyone sees the ones that are most likely to rouse them to action (via customizable notifications, for example)
This reminds me of a saying adopted during GW Bush's horrid presidency, when it became clear that the Iraq War was totally predicated on deceit.
"Clinton lied, but nobody died"
You are 100% correct, that the general population thinks that all politicians lie, so that doesn't move the needle.
What moves the needle is when their lies lead to bad effects for the people. The key IMO is to amplify lies that has led to people's lives being negatively affected. Follow the template: What was the lie, why is it a lie, and how has it led to a harmful effect.
The Dems missed this opportunity badly in 2024 by not prosecuting his lies during COVID more thoroughly and frequently. He didn't just bungle the COVID response, he actively lied about it and made everything worse. COVID was going to be extremely problematic for any leader, but to intentionally lie about it constantly cost hundreds of thousands of lives and economic damage.
Great point, RP2112!
I totally agree, and this should be reflected in *any* community-based effort to call him out for his lies. There probably should be some visual element the community can use to regularly update the cost of each lie in money and/or lives (where applicable--of course, there are some lies that need to be called out even if we can't point to concrete consequences, just because they're despicable, outrageous, and corrosive, like the blood libel I mentioned, or his description of the traumatic brain injuries our soldiers received when Iran retaliated for his actions as "headaches").
Whatever gets created to do this could also be repurposed and applied elsewhere. There could be a Google Docs-based mini-platform called "Pardon Me," for example, that tracks, in close to real-time (daily or weekly), the fresh criminal activity of everyone he's pardoned, and for comparison, what people pardoned by other presidents have done.
The subhead of the mini-platform could be Lawlessness & Disorder, and open with two "summary graphics" regularly updated by the community:
*One graphic would represent subsequent crimes by pardonees of each president as waves of relative size (and soon be captioned the Trump crime wave (with him in a Speedo on a surfboard riding his yuge red/orange algae-laden wave), because I guarantee his wave will be a tsunami compared to the others
*The second one. created downstream as applicable, would be specifically focused on murders, as expressed in units of the victims he featured in his lurid campaign ads, because we can be sure that, for example, at least one of those J6ers is going to kill a whole bunch of Laken Rileys..
Beyond (and following) this, more static graphics and text could compare Trump’s year-by-year record on crime with the presidents before and after, as well as Dems vs Reps over time in general (I've already done this, and surprise, surprise, it nets out a lot like Simon's job creation comparison), include, by way of explanation, the data that shows Dems have kicked GOP a** on economic growth for almost a century now (QED less reason to commit crimes) as well as the data that proves that Dems, not Reps, are the ones "funding the police," and a map showing that all the states with the highest crime rates are red trifectas, etc.
All of which the dynamic new rap sheets for each administration's pardonees will help open users to receive.
There are already a number of fact-checking organizations and venues. PBS does quite a bit of excellent fact checking, for example https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-trump-and-musks-claims-that-they-are-cutting-government-fraud-and-abuse
It's probably one of the reasons this admin wants to pull their congressional appropriation. The Annenberg Public Policy Center provides this resource https://www.factcheck.org/ Snopes.com is a good resource to query or submit your questions to be addressed. PolitiFact is another place to go for help sifting through information. Historically, the local Public Library is THE place to go and dependable librarians help you find information: today they have so much to offer to the public.
Finally, I'd say that we need to educate our children and adults to be able to use their own brains to critically evaluate information.
Hi Deborah. Thanks much for taking the time to read my comment and to post this response, which has compelled me to think through what I'm proposing more concretely and therefore (I hope) make a better case for why it will work. I'm familiar with all the orgs you mentioned, and agree they do a great job. But here's why I think more and different are needed:
* Literally hundreds of lies are being told every day that aren't being fact-checked at all--MAGA applies the same shock and awe strategy to the truth that it does to government, and just like our charge as a whole, it's going to take a community, not just the existing media and fact-checking ecosystem, to combat this.
* Every time a fact-check is done that focuses on merely a fraction of the lies told in a debate, speech, interview, “news” conference et al, the natural assumption of those who experienced that event, directly or indirectly, is that everything not called out was/is true. Especially given that, thanks to factchecking, every politician gets caught saying false and misleading things sometimes.
* As a result, there's no understanding or appreciation among most people of how much they believe to be true really isn't, nor an appreciation that there's a level of lying going on with Trump and MAGA that's orders of magnitude beyond the ordinary mendacity of politicians (and if you can't tell the difference between one lie and a thousand, then a thousand lies is what you'll get)
* It's one thing to hear that he lied 30,000 times (merely a Stalinesque statistic); it's another thing to read a transcript or watch a video and learn, concretely, that nearly every word out of his mouth is a lie, a Soviet level of lying. One of the things that hardened our antipathy to the USSR was our regular exposure to their propaganda about us, every word of which we knew was false because it was us they were talking about. Many people aren't developing that same antipathy about Trump because the vast majority of his lies aren't told about things people know from personal experience aren't true, ie they aren't lies about them or their daily lives; they're lies about everything and everyone else.
* Ironically, lies about the average person and the average person's life are the kinds of lying (or, more charitably, obliviousness) associated with us eg when we tell people the economy is great, they say they're not feeling it, and we call them out as stupid and/or tell them airily that they are being “duped into voting against their own interests” (rather than telling them honestly why things aren't better, even if that means goring the ox of some of our big donors--who are now Trump’s). We've seen what that kind of hand-waving has done for support for us. I believe people could develop that level of antipathy for him if he was thoroughly fact-checked, using simple technologies like Google Docs to do so in the context of the flow of his actual words, either as they experienced them or could imagine experiencing them (eg while reading a transcript). That's when 30,000 lies becomes “my God, this mfer is lying to my face, and he's doing it endlessly, like he either thinks I'm a complete idiot, has no grip on my lived reality, or both.”
* There's actually a small proof of concept for this that Simon pointed out as one of the few bright spots in the aftermath of Biden's dismal debate performance, an Arizona focus group of Hispanic voters who voted 12-0 that Biden, not Trump, had won the debate. Why did they do this? Because they felt Trump did nothing but lie from start to finish. Why did they feel this way? Because Trump did what he did throughout the campaign, blame every problem our country has on immigrants so he could offer a simple solution to all our ills--deport them and use tariffs to punish the whole world for sending them. Problems all solved, no need for pointing fingers internally at the rich, no need to explain anything, (because “when you're explaining, you're losing"--Reagan). The Hispanic focus group turned on him because as immigrants themselves, they knew what he was saying was utter BS. People who aren't recent immigrants don't know that viscerally, so his lying didn't cost him (contd)
* MAGA has done a very effective job of convincing millions of people that all the traditional fact-checkers we both know are biased, an effort that worked, in my opinion, because of the nature of institution-building. As any institution is built, it forms, for the sake of consistency and efficiency, if nothing else, its own culture and language, which becomes increasingly distinct from the rest of the population. It therefore becomes easier and easier for people of bad faith to frame it as alien, other, not like us, and from there, frame it as elite and untrustworthy. Having a community of ordinary people doing fact-checks, everyone in their own untrained, unvarnished language, which is therefore much more the language of ordinary people, people like us, in an era where all expertise has become suspect, makes such fact-checks much more like something heard from a trusted neighbor or colleague, which should inoculate them better against the usual Trumpian attacks.
* What the ShillBoard 100 concept adds to this is something no fact-checker even attempts to do today: surface the worst, most egregious lies, the ones that really matter and can change minds about the man himself.
Thanks for calling out NJ, Simon! I truly believe that Kean Jr would have been ousted but for low voter turnout in 2024 and at least 2 people have already stepped up to challenge him in 2026.
In the meantime, have folks found credible sources for Medicare and Medicaid recipients by congressional district? I would love to send Kean Jr a letter with statistics about how many people in NJ-07 will be hurt by cuts to those services, but I don't feel great about the credibility of the sources I've found so far. (For context, the numbers seem too low to be accurate.)
I would try the Children's Defense Fund. Also I found this from 2023: https://kidshealthcarereport.ccf.georgetown.edu/
Here is what I wrote to Senator Durbin. Then I edited the letter to Senator Duckworth by referring specifically to the layoffs at the FAA and within Health and Human Services. Letter to Durbin:
"As I am sure you are aware, many of us are deeply concerned about the future of our Democracy. We would really appreciate more frequent weekly or twice a week updates by newsletter of what Democrats in the Senate are doing to fight back against trump/musk/vance and their intent to shred our Constitution, as outlined in Project 2025.
Many of us here have been discussing what can be done to delay the terrible cabinet nominations and cuts to key agencies being implemented. The nominations are a threat to our national security, our economy, our right to privacy, and public health. The budget cuts also threaten our national security, economy, the right to privacy, and public health.
Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii has put a “blanket hold” on further nominations to the Department of State until funds for USAID are released. We are requesting that a blanket hold be placed on further nominations to the Department of Justice until musk and his DOGE crew are out of government for good, indicted, arraigned and jailed. They are unqualified, the agency has not been approved by Congress, and obviously none of them have gone through strict security clearances. Could this legal action be handled by Hampton Dellinger, the head of the Office of Special Counsel? I read the article about trump/musk trying to fire him and the appeal underway.
What trump/musk/vance are trying to do is a violation of Article 1 of the Constitution, the Impoundments Act of 1974, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act signed by Ronald Reagan in 1986. I know there are multi-state lawsuits underway but this situation is much too serious to wait for the lawsuits to make their way through the courts.
For further understanding, I read this section from the Congressional Research Service. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IN/IN12200#:~:text=As%20a%20result%2C%20nominations%20subject,for%20that%20action%20to%20occur
Is anyone making calls to the White House?
Thank you Simon -- you are very motivating and I am passing your message on to my networks. I love the comment about taking back the American flag -- let's all do that. I've mentioned before, not sure if in this forum, but I would love to see small groups of us (3-5 or 5-10 people) on street corners in our cities -- and all across the country -- maybe randomly, but on an ongoing basis, wrapped in the American flag as a shawl or banner, but also with signs that say: STOP THE COUP or CORRUPTION BEGETS CORRUPTION or WE DIDN'T ELECT ELON MUSK -- get our creative juices flowing and get visible, post photos of this action everywhere -- this could happen w/o creating a huge demonstration. Just a thought -- maybe Indivisible can help with that - I'm going to ask. :-)
Here is the information on cuts to public health: This is the "Your Local Epidemiologist" Substack.
https://substack.com/inbox/post/157399996
And, what it's like to get fired from CDC:
https://insidemedicine.substack.com/p/what-its-like-to-get-fired-from-the
Simon, thank you for last night's honest but optimistic talk. Called Kaine, Warner, and (yuck) Ben Cline. I'd like to encourage people to help out Virginia's Abby Spanberger. With the government layoffs affecting Virginia badly, we have a real chance to put a Democrat in Richmond and send the odious (batshit crazy) Winsome Sears back home.
This my first day as a Hopium subscriber. I live in Raskin's Maryland district and called him and Senator Van Hollen. Thanks first, concern about budget second. One daughter lives in PA-07. I called Mackenzie on her behalf, congratulating him on the budget priorities he outlined in January (child tax credit, child care tax credit increases), pointing out the problems with Trump's budget, and asking him to join the reps against the Trump budget - which include a fellow PA rep. I called 3 republican senatore, my second daughter lives in Cleveland OH, thanking them for not bringing Trump's budget to the floor, and pointing out the three major problems - tax cuts for billionaires / corporations, benefit cuts for working people via Medicaid and SNAP, and most important to me - exploding the deficit. In my calls, even to Republicans, I try to start with thanking them for whatever small thing I can find.
Great work – great strategy!
Please, everyone stop using the words "working people" in regards to the social safety net. I have an autistic son that can't work and you can't believe how hard I have to fight every blasted year to keep him on anything. For years while I was putting myself thru college I took care of profoundly disabled children and young adults. I wonder if in this day and age people would say( and I did hear this back then as well) just let them die. Heck, Trump has said that about his own disabled relative. And then there are the elderly- I can no longer work and I have to take shots twice a year that cost $5,000 each. Just about the total of my Social Security. I paid into these accounts to the government since I was 16. So, please drop the working.
Thanks for your clarification. I mistakenly used the phrase "working people" and will not again. My intention, now informed by your situation, was to stay away from the assumption that those on medicaid / SNAP are non-working by choice (e.g, lazy???), rather than to leave out the elderly / retired / disabled. I will drop "working" from my vocabulary. What phrase would you suggest to incorporate all groups? Middle class? Lower income?
Jean, just "people" would cover it. Thank you so very much.
Everyone not already an upper millionaire!🤷♀️
Welcome Jean!
I saw some fellow New Mexicans in the chat last night and would like to connect. I just signed up with Indivisible Albuquerque and plan to virtually attend its next meeting.
If you're interested, please message me here, and we can decide how to proceed from there.
I don't do Indivisible, but sent you a DM on Substack Deborah Potter @nmhope2024
FYI posted this in the chat yesterday.
Kickass Representative Melanie Stansbury is having an in-person Town Hall Meeting in Albuquerque tomorrow evening 5:30 to 7:00 pm. To register see her post on BlueSky. https://bsky.app/profile/repstansbury.bsky.social/post/3lil434dwdc2c
On Feb. 9th she had a joint telephone event with NM AG Raúl Torrez to discuss litigation against the administration. (Listen to recording at https://www.facebook.com/share/v/18EKEbGVBP/)
Breshnahan is in my district, PA-08. I will do everything I can to pressure him and ultimately remove him, because he took the place of Matt Cartwright, a great man and honorable public servant. While it is good to see that he may vote against some of the lunacy, he needs to go. The problem we are running into in Pennsylvania is that a lot of these district offices are not staffed or are closed when people show up. This is particularly true of Dave McCormick, who should have NEVER beat Bob Casey, a true Pennsylvanian and public servant. McCormick is a Trump bootlicker who isn't even from this state. He's also a condescending billionaire a-hole, who doesn't give a damn about Pennsylvanians and their struggles. He's there to be a loyal Trump minion, do as little work as possible, and he keeps his offices closed to the public while he goes home to his mansion in Connecticut! I despise him. If there was a way to remove him before 2030, I'd be all for it. We're not real happy with Fetterman either, and I hope someone primaries him in 2028. It makes me sad to say so, but he is not who he was, and he has shifted on so many positions that he's nearly unrecognizable from the candidate we supported and voted for. Governor Shapiro is the only bright light we have right now! Our State AG is a Trumper, (Dave Sunday) which ticks me off as well, because he isn't joining any of the lawsuits that he should be--we need to oust him in 2028 too.
Sheryl, that's awful. What a cast of characters! But please don't send McCormick back to CT! We don't want him.
Can't remember what show I saw this on, but a farmer in Maine had bought into the federal program to reduce power usage and purchased $45,000 worth of solar and its installation. He has been waiting to be reimbursed. Guess that won't be happening now.
Farmers across the country should be contacted by the Dems in their state to see what their stories are since they will vary: farmers in California whose fields were flooded this January since Trump opened the aquifers in Northern California might not be able to get enough water to get them through the summer planting season now, those farmers affected by the non-payment of their USAID crops in the Midwest and I am sure there will be more. Farmers could be a very helpful source of new political voters for us if we start advocating/showing up for them in every state.
Governor Evers (Dem) is WI is putting aid for farmers into the state budget.
This is what I am talking about!
Let me count the ways . . .
Is Trumps endgame to destroy the USA and “render unto Putin”?
Eliminating funding and personnel for critical agencies and promising MAGA supporters a “bonus dividends” which amounts to blood money
"Is Trumps endgame to destroy the USA ..?"
I think it is very important to describe what is actually in the minds of the people who are driving Trump. Simply, they want to return the USA to the period around the Gilded Age -- when taxes and regulations were at a minimum, and people depended on themselves rather than the government. What they want to be rid of is the government that started to get more active and powerful breaking up large monopolies -- and then grew even more during the Great Depression. They don't believe they are "destroying" the USA -- even though that result is possible.
Sad: Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. These people are living in a fantasy world. To Musk, this is all like Sim City.
Gilded Age? I’d go much further back than that, like feudalism or a modern offshoot, like Stalinism.
Correct. These people want a return to the Gilded Age, when America was essentially run by oligarchs. As such, Musk & Trump et al find it natural to ally themselves with other countries run by oligarchs and autocrats, such as Russia, Hungary and Saudi Arabia.
But Karen makes an important point. What we are really witnessing right now is a Neo-Feudalist movement.
They fit the profiles of the robber barons — Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and Andrew Carnegie
At least the robber barons threw society some crumbs by building libraries and the like. This bunch is total “fuck you hooray for me” anarcho-libertarians
Just what I was going to say.