Category: politics

A New New Deal

When We the People

finally wrestle back our democracy, whether this year or next year or thirty years from now, I think we will deserve – and should expect – to be rewarded for our heroic efforts.  Organizing, resisting, defending the rule of law.  That means deep structural change to reform the government and support the citizenry going into the future.  No more bailing a leaky boat. 

It’s time for some kind of New Deal. 

Teddy Roosevelt in his time had the Square Deal.  FDR stepped it up with the New Deal.  LBJ had the Great Society.   We need a new impulse of this reforming movement.  A MAJOR one.  

AOC tried the Green New Deal, but that became a lighting rod for kneejerk partisanship.  I can’t think of a better name than the Gen-X inflected term the New New Deal.  No bullshit.  Everyone knows what it means. It is time to repair the damage done by forty years of Republican sabotage of the New Deal.  The rot started with Reagan with his supply-side fantasy economics and dog-whistled white supremacy.  He courted Christian fanatics as voting blocs but did the bidding of the Heritage Foundation.  The super-rich.  Starve the public good to engorge the already wealthy, and imply it is godly to do so.  “Greed is good.” Now, forty years later, we are suffering the effects of those policies, political and economic.  It’s too expensive, too perilous for an ordinary person to just live a life. 

The New New Deal  

We need to repair and rebalance our government to make it properly democratic and build a social safety net that supports democracy into the future.  This is all doable and well within the bounds of the Constitution.

Here are what I think are the top ten things that should be in any kind of New New Deal. 

1. Universal Voting Rights and Election Integrity

One human, one vote, freely and fairly.  It’s time to stop messing around with the fundamentals of democracy.   End gerrymandering, universal voter registration, paper ballots.  Election Day as a national holiday. Restore the Voting Rights Act.  Hell, make voting required by law.  It works in Australia.  

2. Federal Funding of Federal Elections

End reliance on private money by providing full public funding for all federal campaigns; ban super PACs and dark money.  If it takes an Amendment to ensure that, we do it. 

3. Overturn Citizens United

Get dark money out of politics altogether.  It is corrosive to the entire system.  It allowed the propaganda to spread that brought us to this pass.  Money does not equal speech.  Restore strict limits on campaign contributions and require full transparency for all political spending.  Maybe even put it on a blockchain.

4. Abolish the Electoral College

Again, this will take a Constitutional Amendment, but it is essential for repair of our republic.  The EC is a relic of slavery, and it has extravagantly failed to do what it was ostensibly supposed to do: prevent the election of a tyrannical madman.    The President must be chosen by direct popular vote like any properly democratic country. 

5.  Expand the House of Representatives.  

The House of Representatives was last expanded in 1913, over a century ago.   The population has almost tripled since then.  And that was back in the age of rail; we are in the age of Zoom.  Enlarging the house is not against the Constitution.  It used to be done regularly.  It will make the House more responsive to the People, as it was intended to be. 

6. Reform the Supreme Court

What was supposed to be the bulwark of the rule of law has been completely captured.  It needs dramatic reform.  A binding code of ethics for the Justices, and 18-year term limits are necessary repairs. Also enlarge the size of the court to 13, to meet the number of District Courts. 

7.  Universal Basic income

It is time for the explosion of productivity released by the Industrial and Computer Revolutions to be returned to those who actually produced it, the workers.  We did the labor that allowed this current grotesque explosion of wealth to emerge (cue Jeff Bezos).  We deserve our cut.  And that goes double for the oncoming singularity of wealth and innovation to be released by the AI Revolution. There is enough for everyone. Stop telling us there isn’t.  We see it all around us. 

8. Universal Access to High-Quality Public Education          

An informed, educated citizenry is essential to a functioning democracy.  People who understand what’s at stake and are not swayed by memes and vibes.  Fully fund public K–12 and higher education; invest in trade schools, ensure civic education and critical thinking are at the core.  

9. Strengthen Labor Rights and Collective Bargaining

Capital without the check of Labor will consume the world.  The oligarchs have forgotten that we the people do the labor and buy the products that make them wealthy. Protect the right to unionize, restore collective bargaining, and enforce fair labor standards for all workers.

10. Restore the Fairness Doctrine

In whatever 21st century guise it requires.  We need to reestablish it in spirit — the news needs to be established as a public good again, not a source of revenue.  The Founding Fathers recognized the importance of a free press.  We need to do the same. That educated citizenry needs professional news organizations delivering factual, balanced information.  As it is, it’s nothing but a dopamine extractor. 

My question is, why not swing for the fences?  We are not fighting so damn hard to restore the old, broken status quo.  Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City shows us that.  It’s time to really dig in and fix what’s been broken our entire adult lives.   


There are my suggestions for a New New Deal for the American people.  What are your ideas?  The time to plan is now.   We have the means.  Let’s have the will.

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I Don’t Even Know What to Title This

This was a hell of a weekend.  I hardly feel like I know up from down right now.  Huge protests, tiny parades, political murder, American patriotism.  Personal family stuff.  A neck-snapping series of events.

Two things are staying with me this Monday night.  I don’t know if they relate, or how they do, except perhaps they show the two poles of events in America this past weekend. 

First, every time I see that video clip of the old tank squeaking down the street in Fotus’ limp-dick parade, I feel such a hot stab of mixed shame and glee that I burst out laughing – the kind of laugh that’s forced out of you as a defense mechanism. 

@omgseriouslywtf

Empty crowd at Trump’s birthday parade. All you hear is the squeaking tanks. #omgswtf #omgseriouslywtf #trumpsbirthday #parade #military #trumpsupporters #trump #lol

♬ original sound – OMGSWTF

Shame, because it hurts to see the United States Army brought that low, used like that.  Glee, because it’s exactly what Fotus deserves, a creaky-ass vintage tank creeping alone along the street, while the few people there watch in dead silence.  An absurd, pathetic failure.  Instant karma.  This is why we don’t have these sorts of parades in the United States anyway.  They’re stupid and lame. 

The second thing is the … I guess the lack of shock I feel at the political assassinations in Minnesota.  Which by any normal metric is completely shocking and beyond the pale.  A civil society with the rule of law does not use violence to resolve political disputes.  Horrifying!

But we have been beyond the pale for quite a while now.  

This is the way things are now.  MAGA has been nursing and inculcating violence, poltical violence, for ten years.  They’ve told themselves Democrats are commie devil-worshippers and deserve what they get.  They’ve postured with their guns and cosplayed as warriors when half of them are on disability.  They have actively seeded and stoked these sentiments all across the country while denying all responsibility.  

I don’t know how we put that genie back in the bottle.  I don’t know that we do, not in my lifetime.  These people have been cultivating their rage, their violence, their sense of grievance for a decade now.  It’s no surprise when it bursts out as actual violence. 

But on the other hand there were the No Kings marches, where America stood up and flipped the big double bird to our wannabee dictator.  Even in Minnesota, where the citizens had been advised to stay home because the assassin was still at large, they defied fear and showed up by the thousands.  

I hope the world saw.  All this bullshit is against our will.  The majority of America does not want this.  We want to end it.  My intuition has always been, there are more good people than bad in the world.  But the bad people do an outsized amount of damage.  Right now the bad people are very loud and violent.  But we have to remember they are a minority.  A sick, broken minority.  But this is a democracy, and we intend to keep it. 

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Why I Am a Progressive.

Photo by Charlotte Harrison on Unsplash

I was raised liberal, very liberal.  My Mom was a beatnik and my Dad was an anti-war vet.  But I was also raised to think for myself, so there came a time when I questioned what they had taught me, and had to choose what to believe. 

But even so, what I chose, was that I was a lefty.  A Democrat (back when that still meant something).  I didn’t know the word back then, but a progressive.  Because of something I saw when I was a kid. 

I was eight or nine years old, the early 1970s.  This was the era of “busing.”  “Busing” was a divisive issue that inflamed the whole country.  “Busing” came to stand in as a shorthand for civil rights, race relations, “affirmative action” and the whole freighted issue of the legacy of slavery in this country.

“Busing” was an effort to de-segregate public schools by forcibly mixing the students of schools, black and white, by yes, sending the kids by bus to other schools in their area.  Black kids got bussed to affluent white schools, and white kids to more impoverished black schools.  

Looking back as an adult, that was probably a bad idea, working out the long tail of slavery on the backs of schoolkids who didn’t even understand what was happening.  I don’t think it was very popular with anyone – kids from both races were pulled from their communities and sent to school with strangers up to an hour’s bus ride away. This happened in both the North and the South as I recall.  It was the answer to segregation and the whole country was transfixed by it.  Black parents didn’t like their kids being sent to be picked on by strange kids and teachers.  And white parents … didn’t want their kids going to school with black kids.  Yes, that was the central problem.  I know this because I saw it.

One Sunday we were at my grandparent’s house for dinner in Des Plaines, IL, and I was watching the nightly news on the big console TV.  Sitting cross-legged in front of it, a little girl learning about the world.   

A segment came on about “busing.”  It was about unrest in Boston.  Busing was very unpopular there.  People were forcibly resisting it, blockading schools and busses, so the plan could be defeated by physically preventing the kids from attending.  It was a mess.   

I wasn’t old enough to understand the depth and complexity and long history of race relations.  (Even in college they didn’t teach the truth of Reconstruction as the miserable failure it was.) But I was old enough to understand what I saw before me on the TV screen.  

A florid, beefy white man in a plaid shirt standing in the door of a schoolbus in South Boston, and beating the little black kids who were trying to exit the bus, with a club.  

I will never forget it.  It is burned into my memory.  His red, screaming face.  The blue and white shirt.  The club.  The little kids, kids my age, shielding their heads from the club as they just tried to go to school.  

I had a dim understanding that he was worried about his own kids and their future.  But he was worried because they had to be in the same space as black kids.  That was what he was most worried about.  That was the chief threat.  Not the isolation from friends or peers, or the lack of extracurriculars because of the long bus rides home.  No.  The color of these kid’s skin.  That’s what he was worried about.

I saw that, and I thought, I stand against everything this man stands for and I always will.

And I had a pretty good idea, too, of what that was. “Traditional values.” The church.  Fear-mongering about commies.  Women as second-class citizens, people of color as non-people.  Bad economics and a kind of performative rah-rah “patriotism” that I already knew was bogus.  It all went together.  Hating on “busing” because you hate black people and don’t want your kids around them.  Squares. John Birchers.  Republicans.  Bad people. 

Values are very important to me.  I believe every single person has it in them to do the right thing if they look into their heart.  At any moment, you have the free will to stop and change your decision and do the right thing. 


Instead, this guy chose to beat little kids with a club.  Ten toes down, this guy went there and did that.  Beat kids.  With a club. 

So I saw real early the hate and cruelty that fueled conservative politics.  You could explain and rationalize that guy’s thinking as “economic uncertainty” or “malaise” or whatever you like, but what it led him to actually do was beat kids with a club. 

A few years later when Reagan was elected, I was horrified.  I couldn’t believe it.  Morning in America, what a bunch of bullshit.  I knew we were giving the country over to people like the guy with the club. 

Forty-five years later, we are still feeling the effects of that.  Reaganomics.  The Christian Right.  The loss of the Fairness Doctrine.  Rollbacks on civil rights everywhere, for women, for queers, for people of color.


That man is long dead now, the man with the club, but we are living in the world he fought for.  

And I still stand against him and his club and everything he believed to this day.   It’s simple to me.  It’s a matter of right and wrong.  My parents may have been eccentric hipsters, but they DID teach me right from wrong, and I will never forget. 

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Die Back at the Root

The Brutal Kindness of Pruning

We had snow in January, and it decimated my elephant ear plant, Bert.  I didn’t realize how bad it was until the top half of his stalk fell off. 

An elephant ear plant with an ugly, rotten trunk

So I had to perform some gruesome but necessary plant surgery, and hack off that dead, rotten trunk so the new shoots can grow.  ChatGPT told me to sprinkle cinnamon on the clean but still horrific wound as an antifungal, so I did that.  It was smelly and slimy and I felt terrible.  I learned from the book The Light  Eaters by Zoe Schlanger that plants hate to be touched.  But it was necessary.  Bert doesn’t have to waste energy on that dying stalk now.  Plants can survive even if they have to die back to the root.

 Humanity at the Brink

I think that might be what human civilization has to do: die back to the root and start over.  

I think history’s verdict will be that in the first half of the 21st century, humanity became so enamored of our technology and endless streaming entertainment that we lost touch with what was truly real.  We are about to be forcibly reminded, as climate change batters civilization to rubble with a never-ending chain of fires, floods and super-storms.  Nation-states will be unable to respond to cascading emergencies.  The insurance industry will collapse, leaving citizens and capital alike unable to recover from disasters.  Those fires and floods will bring famine, plagues and wars. 

 The Uneven Collapse to Come

Not everywhere will get knocked back to the Age of Steam.  High-tech enclaves like Shenzen and Silicon Valley will remain, full of Ais and robots.  But they will be walled from the outside world and still consume more than their share of resources.  They won’t be popular.  

It seems the only way, though.  Die back to the root.  Every structure of our society is so broken, so unjust and extractive, they may be impossible to fix.  They may just have to die.  They seem bent on it, the forces of global capital.  Sucking every last drop of blood out of Mother Earth and her people as they go.

 What Survival Might Require

Those roots we will die back to will be local – our own towns, our own people.  Food, water: the integrity of our land and waters so that we may *eat and drink.* As nation-states collapse, states and then cities will be thrown back on their own resources.   Food you can grow yourself of from the farms outside of town.  Plant-based diets to ease the burden on the Earth.  Localized power like solar cells and other renewables.  Communities looking to their own needs instead of relying on fragile long-distance networks that can be broken by catastrophe at any time.

My novel The Pono Way takes place in the 2090s, about halfway between this world and that one.  Nation-states are still hanging on, barely.  But more and more people are leaning more on their own resources, like the sea-steadings.

The Potential for Regrowth

Once a plant dies or is pruned back, it can concentrate its energy on new growth and recovery.  That is the effect of Dark Ages in human history – they clear away what is dead so something new can grow.  Old structures, old religions, old ways of seeing the world.   Humanity has made it through dark Ages before.  Never with so much at stake, but it probably felt like it at the time.  What could be worse than the Fall of Rome?  Europe and the Mediterranean nursed that wound for a thousand years.

What I hope we gain is, not a learning, but a remembering: we are not above nature, we are in it and of it.  Its flourishing is ours.  From the microbes in our guts to the mycelial networks running through every foot of living soil under our feet, to the phytoplankton in the seas.  All one, cells in the body of Our Mother.  Capitalism and its growth mindset have brought us to the brink of ruin.  I hope we realize, really internalize, believe that we’re all in this together.  Stewardship, not profit becomes the highest value. 

Creative Destruction

The lesson of the dieback is that new hope can come from the ruins.  The collision of the Old and New Worlds was a different kind of Dark Age, brutal and tragic, literally an apocalypse.  But 500 years later a nation of that New World sent men to the Moon.  The historian Yuval Harari said that, even with all its horror, the “discovery” of the New World was the most important event in human history, because it showed all humanity that things we never imagined were possible.  All wisdom was not contained in the mythic past.  We could look forward, to a new horizon.  A New World. That was an epochal change.  

My hope is that we can make it past this new Dark Age, the bitter fruit of our foolhardiness, and civilization on the other side will be better and stronger than before.  More grounded in the earth and the people around us, more wise, more just.  Using science and technology to hallow the Earth instead of despoil it.  Mother Earth is pruning us. 

And yes, it may take 500 years. But the civilization that grows out of that dieback should be the one that can take us to the stars. Just like Bert will grow back as luxurious as before.  This after all is why I write speculative fiction; to look at the future and see how we can change it for the better.  Or what happens if we don’t. 

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This Destruction Is All for Nothing

This is one of those moments where you have to take a step back and ask—
What are we even doing?

Why is this happening?

There’s no war.
No Depression.
No invasion.
No great crisis demanding all this destruction.

We’re not reacting to catastrophe.
We’re choosing it.
Burning it all down for no good reason.

Manufactured panic.
Internet goblins.
Drag queen story hour.
Book bans.
And now, the civil service—gutted. Careers destroyed.
All for a lie.

Because some angry, scared white men would rather burn the country down that share it equitably.

I recorded this video because I couldn’t keep quiet.

Lincoln said:

> “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”

And here we are.

This isn’t a righteous uprising.
It’s a tantrum.
And if we don’t say it plain, they’ll take everything with them.

It’s not about freedom.
It’s not about safety.
It’s not about survival.

It’s all for nothing.

This was hard to record.
But I had to say it.
The video’s below.

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In Praise of Public Service

It’s not easy to get a federal job. My husband Sam tried for years. The positions are highly competitive, requiring aptitude tests, education, and experience. These are not people who just stumbled into a cushy gig. They are professionals. They are competent. And they have dedicated themselves, often quietly, to the running of our society.

The Civil Service Bloodbath

Mass firings. Loyalty tests. Lifelong careers destroyed overnight. I have words about the current DOGE bloodbath in the Federal Civil Service.

It’s being handled very cavalierly by Elon and his crew of coding dweebs, and by the national press. Let me set the record straight.

The current concept of the “deep state” is either a mass of dead-eyed zombies nursing a paycheck, or a cabal of evil conspirators who are behind everything bad. But no, these are ordinary people, doing their jobs, usually for way less money than they would get in the private sector, because they care about it. Because they want to be of service.

Why Public Service Mattered to Me

My career in the public library mattered to me because it was about helping people and just giving them information, when it seems everything else in society is trying to restrict it. And it didn’t answer to the almighty dollar. It wasn’t about money. Because not everything is reducible to the bottom line. Government is not a profit-making enterprise.

Who Gets Hired and Why

There’s not much deadwood in the Federal civil service. Those are desirable jobs, even if they don’t pay as much: job security, retirement, healthcare. You have to be trained, educated. Know your shit. And you have to be prepared to wait a long time for your job application and hiring process to grind its way through the bureaucracy.

And they offer something else the private sector doesn’t: the opportunity to be of service. The Forest Service, the Postal Service, farm inspectors. There are a fair number of military veterans in the Federal ranks, because they want to continue to be of service. And they are non-partisan. Parties in power switch back and forth, individual workers have their own personal beliefs, but the work still goes on. The mail still has to be delivered. Farms still have to be inspected. The National Weather Service predicts storms. Who’s in the White House doesn’t change any of that.

Bureaucracy: The Hidden Backbone of Society

It’s human nature to bitch about how slow and useless the bureaucracy is – but when it stops working altogether: when the water stops flowing, when FEMA doesn’t come, when another salmonella outbreak occurs, people start screaming. These services are the scaffolding of modern civilized life. I think it’s better they are run by people who aren’t trying to make a profit.

How Public Service Changed Me

My time as a civil servant in the public library made me both a more compassionate and tougher person. More compassionate, because I came to see how ruthlessly human beings are used by “the system” here in the USA. Drained of their economic productivity and cast aside. And how so many people start and live their lives behind the eight ball for absolutely no fault of their own, just bad luck. Public services are supposed to help those people, not further exploit them.

But also tougher, because I needed a thick skin to embody the institutional authority that made people abide by the rules. Enforcing those rules made me more of a hardass, not less – because I came to see how enforcing “the rules” was actually the best way to ensure all the resources the library has to give were shared as equitably as possible. Everyone thinks they’re special, an exception to the rules. But if everybody’s special, nobody is, and human affairs descends into a morass of whimsy and favoritism. I feel that strongly. (The exception being those cases of actual humanitarian need. No, you can’t use the phone, but the little kid who needs to call his Mom to come get him, can.)

DOGE Firings Are an Attack on Civil Society

Look at the chaos going on with DOGE now. The propaganda is that Elon is only firing “probationary employees,” a bunch of noobs who aren’t needed. But any time you get promoted or change jobs in the civil service, you go back on “probation” for periods as long as two years. The effect of these mass DOGE firings has been to kneecap the federal civil service at every level and across the country, to disable its ability to resist Trumpian autocracy. And to rob a lot of people of their beloved careers in which they had worked decades, with no warning and for no good reason. In fact, bad ones. To consolidate personal power. Replace bureaucrats with Trumpian loyalists. Undermine public trust in the government and institutions.

Respect the Work, Defend the Workers

See the DOGE foolishness for what it really is – an attack on civilized society. On the people who keep the gears of the country turning. You don’t notice those gears when the machine is working. But when it breaks – when the roads wash out, the checks stop coming, you want us bureaucrats there, doing our jobs in service of you, the American people.

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Art as Resistance: Writing in Troubling Times

I’m doing good work on Majestic Seventeen, my current project. Creeping forward 500 words at a time. “The End” has assumed the nature of the horizon: an abstract concept that recedes before you, never attained. It’s a big book!

But I write because I don’t know what else to do.

When the World Feels Like It’s Burning

It’s hard to articulate even to ourselves how bananas and terrible everything is right now. Oligarchs crashing the entire world economy to enrich themselves further. Law-abiding people being detained and disappeared. A dipshit narcissist tech nerd chainsawing the federal government for no good reason as far as I can see. Meaning and reality themselves totter under the weight of lies and conspiracy theories. And that doesn’t even touch on the endemic problems that fester in the background — climate change, inequality. The wheels are just coming off our civilization.

This is why I write speculative fiction. To try to imagine something different, something better. Hope arising in the ruins, from lost Atlantis, from America. I have personal experience with that, rising from ruins. Hurricane Katrina. This year is the twentieth anniversary. It always shows up in my work and it will show up in a big way this year.

I watched this ruination for a while. My entire career. Public librarianship gives you a raw faceful every day of the structural injustice and endemic heartlessness of our society. You work with people who have been failed by society in every possible way. Deliberately, methodically. Then kicked when they’re down. The “digital divide” just exacerbated that over the last thirty years. Requiring computer literacy and expensive technology from people who were functionally illiterate, the first of the many ways society failed them. Having to go online to apply for a job at Walmart. It isn’t right. The public library has been the finger in the dike of that flood of injustice all along.

The year of the pandemic, I had a health crisis of my own, and when early retirement was offered as a cost saving measure for city government, I took it. So I could turn my attention to writing. Before I died.

Art Is Not a Luxury. It’s a Spell.

I pulled an Oracle card today, from the World Shamans Oracle, and the card was Orpheus. The tragic, mad poet-sage who could move the stones to weep with his song. Appropriate since I was going to work on this very blog post. The guidebook says, “Poetry is a form of shamanism that takes place in language; each word acquires value in the verses and has the power to re-enchant the world.”



That’s what I’m trying to do, why my writing feels as much a spiritual practice to me as creativity. Re-enchant the world. Western culture is absolutely desperate to re-enchant the world. I state that in my Artist’s Statement: I write “pulpy, entertaining speculative fiction that also advocates progressive values, and interrogates structures of power and belief. My goal is to entertain people by telling tales of other worlds, which help them think how we could manifest a better world here and now. ”

In times like these, art is not just entertainment or a luxury. Not an escape. It is resistance. It is survival. Do you remember how desperately we clung to art through the Covid pandemic lockdown? It was the only thing that got us through. Shows, comedy, music. Even baking bread like it was a blessed sacrament. That is what I learned from the pandemic: art is non-negotiable.

Art is life.

The Power of Naming

If shamans are healers, I’m not a healer of bodies, but of meaning. Telling stories that help bind up the wounds of civilization. The Pono Way is about solarpunk, DIY resistance to imperialism and the dangers of xenophobia. Even people who don’t like the book get the message. Daughter of Atlas is about the collapse of imperialism and the danger of ecological destruction. Majestic Seventeen is turning out to be about facing down systems of power, control, and belief. Yes, they’re all adventure speculative fiction, but I hope they’re more than just that.

My Lane is the Highway

I reference this more in my post My Lane is the Highway. I don’t need to write to put food on the table. I can let my ideas expand, experiment with different forms, different shades in the prism of speculative fiction. I write to entertain people but also make them think. Before anything new arises in the world, someone has to imagine it. I can do that.

The world we have now didn’t arise from natural selection or the invisible hand of the market. It was deliberately made, and it is working as intended. Extracting wealth and blood from the masses to gorge the billionaires. It can be unmade. All this suffering isn’t necessary. We can do better.

A Closing Incantation

So I write, because it is one thing I can control, and contribute, when the world is collapsing around me. Even at the end of empires, life still goes on. People still work and earn money. They still need entertainment. Spec Fic has always been a Trojan horse to sneak in new ideas, on the pages of pulp magazines and the panels of comic books.

My pen is my wand. My book is my spell. I sing for a better world. Creating something when the world is falling down is an act of defiant hope.

So what do you sing? What is your spell? How are you going to re-enchant the world? It needs you to dream a new dream, now more than ever. Join me.

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That’s My Dad

I haven’t been able to get this out of my head, so I’m getting it down.

I’m sure you’re aware of Gus Walz’s big moment at the Democratic Convention:

A young man, overwhelmed with love and pride as his dad accepts the Vice Presidential nomination. It was a beautiful moment, pure emotion. Pure love. M heart squeezed as I watched.

So I knew instantly MAGA was going to come for him.

The leading edge haters did — Ann Coulter, Dinesh D’Souza (who is a convicted felon by the way). The usual bottom feeders, calling him “a puffy beta,” “weird” and a “soy boy.” Just mocking and dragging this young man for loving his dad. He’s only 17.

But they were quickly checked by people pointing out Gus is neurodivergent. He has a learning disorder and anxiety. Mocking the disabled is still too much for rank and file MAGA, although their Dear Leader. can do it with impunity.

Remember this?

Some MAGA complained that they were “tricked” into mocking Gus. Because they “didn’t know” he was disabled. Like this fine specimen.

The Walz family has spoken publicly about Gus’s challenges and how they help him navigate them. It took a lot for him to be there in that huge stadium full of screaming people at all — as someone with anxiety as well, I know. I would have melted down. With fear, not happiness.

But here’s the thing — it doesn’t matter if Gus is neurodivergent OR NOT. Being overwhelmed with love for your father at his proudest moment is PERFECTLY NORMAL HUMAN EMOTION. There is nothing strange or unnatural about it. We should all hope to be so loved.

And you just don’t mock people like that. You just don’t. * It’s cruel. It’s small. It’s ugly.

All sorts of grown-ass people who should know better mocked a teenage boy publicly on the Internet. For *showing emotion.*

This is the worldview MAGA and Project 2025 want to bring us. This kind of “Biblical man- and womanhood.” I’m horrified by the vision of human relations they espouse. Where men are supposed to be some kind of emotionless brutes who only speak with their fists or their dick. The only acceptable emotions are rage and lust.

And women are — well, property, basically. Livestock. Breeders. Look at the landscape post-Dobbs: women who could have a brief, safe medical procedure and go on to live their lives and have more children, are dying or having their fertility forever destroyed. The right fetishizes baby-making, but don’t care if women are killed and mutilated when it goes wrong. Why do they hold our lives so cheaply?

Trump and Co. will strip women of the right to vote if they can. They flat-out say so. Peter Thiel, Posobiec, Fuentes. It’s in there.

Black men will be next.

This is the world a vote for Trump will bring us. Shitty little white men imposing their thwarted desires to be “strong” and “powerful” on the whole nation, by color of law if they can. By force if they can’t.**

These people are not mentally healthy. My husband laughed at me when I implicated “abusive parenting,” but Google “blanket training” and see if you agree with him, or with me.

Emotionally mature and stable people know, like Vice President Harris said, that leadership is truly marked not by who you beat down, but who lift up. VP Harris and Coach Walz have lifted a lot of people in their lives.

We can’t let these broken people, who can’t even recognize real love when they see it., run the country. Vote for Gus’s dad and his running mate on November 8.

*Except fascists. Mocking them is essential.

**Expect violence leading up to and on the Election Day. That’s a whole separate thing.

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For Love of Country

So I’m sitting here this morning rewatching the Democratic National Convention Roll Call, and I’m just weeping for love of country. The Roll Call starts at about 1:20:00. I don’t know how to link that, sorry.

But this is a wake and bake kind of day, and I’m retired and can do things like sit and watch a political convention all day. So take that into account.

I’m watching it on YouTube. As you see above. If you just want to watch it, it’s live-streaming on practically every social platform: YouTube, Facebook, even X.* Even Twitch. That’s how I’ve been watching. It’s great.

I should have mentioned it sooner. But there are still a couple days of convention left, and you can replay it and catch up. No commentary. ZERO spin or slant. Just the actual process of the convention itself. If you’re fed up with the “MSM” for our various reasons, ditch it and watch this beautiful celebration of democracy for yourself.

No overpaid talking heads flapping their yaps, creating their narratives, telling us we didn’t see what we all just saw. And it’s not slow or dull. It moves along at a fine clip. It is a stage production after all, and these people, unlike the GQP, are professionals. Watch it and see the diversity of the United States. This is the real America.

The idea of staging the Roll Call as some kind of geriatric rave was strangely genius. It has a live DJ with the most GenX playlist ever. But people were hyped and it moved along and it was genuinely emotional to see our country actually represented. The party grunts, the people who plan and execute these things, must all be GenX now. If we end up as kingmakers in the background, that seems strangely appropriate, doesn’t it?

I’ll have more to say about the power of live video in the future. But for now, if you’re sick of the media bullshit, watch the process of party-level democracy for yourself. It’s fun.

  • I’m not giving those sons of bitches any clicks.
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It Has To Be Said

So I watched a bit of Donald Trump’s “economic policy press conference” — via YouTube, not cable news.

Nobody is saying what needs to be said, so I’m saying it: He’s lost his mind.

That was two hours of insane, contentless raving, while the “press” stands there and says nothing. The same old ideas he has fixed in his rotting brain: windmills kill birds. Hordes of “migrants.” Barack Obama. No “policies,” no answers to “questions,” just mania. The stress of his criminal career crashing down around him while he “tries to run for office” has been too much for him. He needs a 5150.

The press hounded Joe Biden for being slow of speech until he was forced to step down. But they run hours of Trump’s deranged ramblings and say NOTHING.

It’s clear now the Fourth Estate has turned against democracy. Treat it accordingly.

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