Happy Friday all. I’m writing to you today from Raleigh, North Carolina where I am excited to be spending the weekend campaigning with Anderson Clayton, Josh Stein, Governor Cooper and the good Democrats and Hopium community members who are busting their ass to turn this state blue this November.
The Republican Convention is over and last night Donald Trump gave the longest, most bizarre and worst speech at a party convention in American history. Friends of mine from across the country who are not that involved in politics reached out to me shocked at how bat shit crazy he sounded, how long he went on, how unfit and unwell he so clearly is. That he was oh so weak not Trumpian strong. Here at Hopium none of this was a surprise. We’ve been talking about him from Day 1 here. We know he is a rapist, fraudster, traitor and felon. We know he is far more extreme and dangerous now than he was in 2016 or 2020. We know that this danger to our democracy, our freedoms and our future became far more manifest when he picked pro-Russia extremist JD Vance as his running mate and heir apparent. To us here at Hopium we didn’t need to hear a single word of that terrible speech last night to know what they are fighting for, what they want for this country:
They want Putin to win, the West to lose. The border to be in chaos, and migrants to keep flowing into the country. Americans to lose even more rights and freedoms. The planet to warm faster. 10 year olds to carry their rapist's baby to term, and for more women to die on operating room tables. Tens of millions to lose their health insurance. More dead kids in schools. Verified rapists in positions of authority. A restoration of pre-Civil Rights era white supremacy. Huge new tariffs which will raise prices on everything and wreck the global economy which has made us prosperous. Big new tax cuts for their wealthiest donors and tax increases for every day people. Books banned across the US. Seniors to pay more for insulin and prescription drugs. Foreign governments free to pollute our daily discourse and harass our citizens. Teenagers to work night shifts in meat packing plants and not go to school. The minimum wage to stay at $7.25. Mass arrests and mass deportations of immigrants long settled in the US. Insurrectionists to be pardoned. To end American democracy for all time.
Hannibal Lecter. Future GOP meetings in Russia-allied Venezuela. Hitler’s “poisoning the blood.” Autocratic leaders of China, Russia, Hungary and North Korea heaped with praise and respect. J6 criminals are “hostages.” Another embrace of QAnon, a violent cult calling for the jailing and assassination of Democrats. It was all there, ugly as it fucking gets, extreme, nothing held back. Another confirmation of why we are all working so hard to win the election, and why hard-working people of this great country deserve much better than this Putin-loving lunatic.
The contrast between what they want and what Joe Biden and Democrats have done, the progress we’ve overseen, is something I go deep into in the short video above and in my With Dems presentation. We’ve talked about how in the coming days we need to establish the “choice” between our pragmatic successful governing and their extremism. That choice is clearer today than it has ever been. For here’s what Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Democrats have done:
In the last few months we’ve gotten repeated and powerful confirmations of the success of the Biden Presidency - inflation *fell* last month and is running at the Fed’s target rate over the past six months, crime and murder rates are way down, gas prices are down, the flow to the border is down. We’ve had the strongest economic recovery of any advanced economy in the world, the best job market since the 1960s, the lowest uninsured rate in American history, the deficit is trillions less, the Dow has broken 40,000 and all three indices continue to hover in record territory. Domestic oil, gas and renewable production continue to be at all time highs leaving America more energy independent than it has been in decades. The Wall Street Journal has called the American economy the “envy of the world,” and the Economist recently wrote about the unprecedented start up boom America is experiencing right now. Biden’s big three investment bills have dramatically accelerated the energy transition necessary to combat climate change and will be creating opportunities and jobs for our workers for decades to come. The President has reinvigorated the Western alliance, been an historic champion of democracy and freedom, and campaigned to help successfully defeat the fascists in recent European and French elections.
Critically, voters in the states we need to win know things are better where they are:
Here’s Biden Campaign Chair Jen O’Malley Dillon this morning on Morning Joe talking about the state of the race and the path forward. I encourage everyone to watch this interview in full:
I also got this text from the Biden-Harris campaign this morning:
Hi, Simon. I'm Rachel with the Democrats. I'm volunteering this weekend to talk to voters in key states. Our phone bank will feature Roohi Rustum, the Team Biden-Harris National Organizing Director, who will kick us off this Sunday, July 21, at 1 PM ET. Can I count on you to join us?
RSVP here: https://txt.democrats.org/xd5m/
For those who want to help Joe Biden this weekend this looks like a really good way to do so.
Friends, wherever you are on the path forward for Democrats we simply have to keep working or we will lose. We can debate, that’s okay. Not working for Democrats is not okay. And as I’ve talked about in recent days we also need to resist the desire to argue and fight right now for that is what MAGA, Russia, China and Iran all want - they want us divided, split, fighting, splintering. If you don’t like other Democrats doing it, don’t do it yourself. My plea is for you to use your limited time and energy to be constructive, to lead, to bring us together so we can win and not take actions that push us apart.
For here at Hopium we do more and worry less, and we have a whole lot of doing to do in the coming months to win this thing:
Biden-Harris - $595,000 today, $650,000 goal - Donate | Volunteer | Learn More
Winning The House - $534,000 today, $600,000 goal - Donate | Volunteer | Learn More. We’ve also raised more then $43,000 into the individual House campaigns (you can either give to all 12 or each one individually)
North Carolina - $323,000 today, $400,000 goal - Donate | Volunteer | Learn More | Watch my interview with NC Dem Chair Anderson Clayton
Arizona/Ruben Gallego - $292,000 today, $350,000 goal - Donate | Volunteer | Learn More | Watch my interview with Ruben Gallego
Nebraska/Blue Dot - $121,000 today, $150,000 goal- Donate | Volunteer | Learn More | Watch my interview with NE Dem Chair Jane Kleeb
Here’s how you can do even more:
Join me and Anderson Clayton in Raleigh, NC this afternoon at 5pm by donating to the NCDP Unity Dinner and signing up here
Watch our interviews with Janelle Bynum (OR-5), George Whitesides (CA-27), Kirsten Engel (AZ-06) and Andrei Cherny (AZ-01)
Volunteer for the Biden-Harris campaign - their volunteer program is really ratcheting up - check it out and sign up for a shift of calls into the battlegrounds today!
Commit to Vote on Day 1 and get everyone you know to join you
Sign up for our next Hopium-wide gathering on Tuesday at 7pm ET.
Russia Attacked Our Party And The Nation On This Day In 2016 - It was this day, the Friday after the Republican Convention in 2016, when Russia launched its massive - and successful - intervention in our election on behalf of Trump. For a reminder of what happened here’s a passage from a 2018 Washington Post story:
On a late July day in 2016, Donald Trump, the GOP nominee for president, stood at a lectern in Florida, next to an American flag, and urged a U.S. adversary to become involved in the election campaign and find tens of thousands of emails wiped from the server of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.
“Russia, if you’re listening,” he said at a news conference at one of his resorts, “I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”
That same day, July 27, several Russian government hackers launched an attack against the email accounts of staffers in Clinton’s personal office, according to a sweeping indictment Friday by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. At or around the same time, the hackers also targeted 76 email addresses used by the Clinton campaign, investigators said.
The remarkable timing of the Russian attempt on Clinton’s servers is just one of the new details revealed in the indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence officers, who Mueller alleges hacked the email accounts and computers of Democratic officials and organizations in an audacious effort to influence the U.S. election.
Although the broad outlines of the hacking and influence campaign have been widely reported, the indictment describes for the first time the identities, techniques and tactics of the operation to disrupt American democracy.
It includes details on how the Russians, using an encrypted file with instructions, delivered their trove of hacked emails to WikiLeaks, the online anti-secrecy organization led by Julian Assange that became the main platform for the Russians to display their trove of hacked emails.
The indictment also reflects an aggressive but somewhat inartful operation in which hackers used the same computer servers to launder money by using the online currency bitcoin as they did to lure their victims and to register sites they used for hacking.
The hackers worked for the spy agency called the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff, or GRU, the indictment said.
They also allegedly targeted a state election board, identified by U.S. officials as Illinois. The Russians stole information about 500,000 voters, including names, addresses, partial Social Security numbers, dates of birth and driver’s license numbers, according to the indictment.
A central reason I launched Hopium 16 months ago was to help Democrats across the country understand the nature of the conflict we find ourselves in, and to give you tools to help you defend your democracy, your freedoms and your future. Here’s what I wrote to you on that very first day of Hopium:
Though I’ve been in politics for a long time, my journey fighting the “red wave” over the past year changed my understanding of the work that needs to get done to defeat MAGA, tell our inspiring story more effectively, and ensure that freedom and democracy prevail.
Basically I came to understand that our politics was changing and I had to change with it. It led me to conclude that my old organization, NDN, which I founded back in 1996, was no longer the right vehicle for me. It did a lot of good over a long period of time, and we built a remarkable community there. As I discuss in my recent interview with Ron Brownstein in the Atlantic, I feel like we are entering a new political era in America, one that requires new strategies and approaches. NDN was built for a different era, and it had a different mission. I needed to do something new, organize my work in new ways. So here I am. With all of you.
I am calling it Hopium Chronicles because I want this to be a journey guided by hope and optimism, of belief in ourselves, in love of country and a clear understanding of the nature of the conflict we are in. I have become convinced that part of Greater MAGA’s strategy is to intentionally poison our discourse with negative sentiment every day. They want us to feel bad about America, our democracy, our leaders, our institutions, our success, each other, ourselves. We cannot let them do that any more. While they talk American down every day, we need to talk it up. While they spread lies, we respond with truth and data. Hopium is a rejection of the darkness they are trying to spread. It is a way of standing up for our great country and its remarkable people. It is the key to how we win.
We know the Russians are going to try to elect Trump again this year. Though I am much less worried about their ability to do so because we have something today we did not have in 2016 - a mature, powerful, tested set of warriors for our democracy who are going out there every day and busting their ass for our country - all of you.
Keep working hard all. It’s how we win - Simon
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