Trump defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth’s mother called him "an abuser of women"
Wow. If anyone needed any more evidence that Trump's Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth is unfit for the job, look no further than the words of his own mother. Penelope Hegseth told her son in a 2018 email to him that “You are an abuser of women – that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego...You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth,” she added, advising her son to “get some help and take an honest look at yourself." Yeah, this guy definitely sounds like leadership material.
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Brian Tyler Cohen and Marc Elias break down the nomination of Trump hardliner Kash Patel to lead the FBI.
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Michael J. Fox leads the charge against Parkinson's disease
Michael J. Fox Foundation: With nearly 90,000 new diagnoses in the United States each year, Parkinson’s disease is the fastest growing and second-most-common neurodegenerative disease in America. Tackling this silent menace is going to require a united effort from the public and from our representatives in Congress, so Michael J. Fox is mobilizing a national movement to help policymakers understand what matters to people with Parkinson’s and share our stories to expand our understanding of this vicious disease.Will you add your name to stand with Michael J. Fox and the one million Americans living with Parkinson’s disease and be ready when it’s time to reach out to your elected officials?
Trump cabinet picks show disdain for victims of sex assault
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, Detroit Free Press: "Every 68 seconds, an American is sexually assaulted. Only a third of the estimated 440,000 victims over the age of 12 each year will ever report, often due to negative emotions such as guilt, shame, and self-blame. Survivors feel they won’t be believed, so why bother reporting, opening themselves up to ridicule, judgment and shame? So what is it we are telling victims of these brutal, life-altering crimes, when our President-elect seeks to elevate alleged fellow perpetrators to cabinet positions and other high levels of power in our government? With these nominations, we are telling survivors of sexual assault that they don’t matter, that their trauma is meaningless and that they should stay silent. And they will. Those who will receive this message are not just victims, who will be discouraged from reporting, but also the judges and jurors who will decide sexual assault cases in the criminal and civil courts, and, perhaps most chillingly, those on the front lines in the war on sexual assault: our law enforcement community. These nominations reduce the often-devastating trauma that affects victims throughout the rest of their lives to an unfortunate public relations hurdle to be overcome by powerful people, being lifted further up our nation’s power structures. When the White House asks the people, the press and the U.S. Congress to overlook or ignore these accusations as mistakes or minor details, balanced against nominees' desirable ideologies or resumes, they beg you to ignore the lifelong suffering of their victims, and so many others out there who already feel justice is outside of their reach."
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The price America paid for its first big immigration crackdown
Greg Rosalsky, NPR: "This 1882 law is now popularly known as 'the Chinese Exclusion Act.' It banned both skilled and unskilled Chinese laborers from immigrating to the US for ten years. Symbolically and politically, this bill was a big deal: it was the first significant crackdown on immigration in American history, a message that the federal government opposed Chinese immigration, and a reaffirmation that Chinese immigrants already in America could never become citizens. In the years after the Act's passage, West Coast newspapers and populist agitators grew angry that Chinese immigrants were still entering the country and demanded that the government do more. This was the beginning of what you might call the national fight against 'illegal immigration' — because before this virtually all immigration to the United States was legal. But the growing discontent with the first iteration of the Chinese Exclusion Act wasn't just about its lack of enforcement and loopholes. For many white Americans, simply preventing the flow of new Chinese immigrants wasn't enough. They wanted expulsions and deportations of the Chinese people who already lived here — even though the vast majority of them were here legally. And soon white vigilantes would take matters into their own hands. The crackdown against Chinese immigrants... hurt most of the white population in the West. And, further, it made West Coast towns and cities that had large Chinese populations in 1882 less of a magnet for white workers from the East because economic opportunities in these places shriveled. The economists find that Chinese exclusion, in its many 1882 and post-1882 incarnations, slowed down the economic growth and development of the West."
Buc-ees is the sickness at the heart of America
Bradley Brownell, Jalopnik: "The United States may not have the kinds of pre-Christian mega-structure buildings that exist in nearly every other corner of the globe. No, we aren’t living amongst the gorgeous marble altars to a pantheon of gods, or the crumbling remains of towering temples or palaces. But what we lack in vintage we’re more than making up for lost time clearing space in our lives for modern day gods. We’ll absolutely clear a couple dozen acres of pristine natural land to plop down a giant fueling depot with hundreds of gas pumps, miles-long car washing robot tunnels, and a grocery store/barbecue restaurant/junk store packed with shit nobody needs. Buc-ee’s is our Parthenon, The Automobile is our Athena, and that chubby and cheerful wood-chewing rodent is her symbolic owl stand-in. This country is a seriously bizarre place to live, and Buc-ee’s is a microcosm of our American existence at present. This combination gas station-grocery store-way of life is a mirror we have erected to show us ourselves. It’s the highway equivalent of junk food. It almost certainly shouldn’t exist, and we are worse as a culture for having had it, but goddamn does it flip the right switches in our collective brain. It is truly junk that shouldn’t be great, but the rot at the core of America is what makes us who we are. Buc-ee’s, the Bass Pro Shops pyramid, and ordering shit we’ll throw away in a month from Temu, these are the new Gods of America, and they deserve their shrines."
The Democrats’ next campaign should appeal to their base, not swing voters
Steve Phillips, The Guardian: "Many people are drawing the wrong conclusions about what happened in the 2024 election. The conventional wisdom is that large swaths of population groups shifted their political allegiances to Donald Trump, propelling him to victory over Kamala Harris. A more careful reading of the data, however, shows that those conclusions are inaccurate, and the biggest problem for Democrats was a failure to turn out Democratic voters. Coming to terms with the unfounded faith in voter persuasion – at the expense of tried and true voter turnout programs – will have profound implications for the future of the Democratic party and the country. Looking more closely at the results and comparing them to the data from the 2020 election, one can see that while the counties did swing, the voters, for the most part, did not. What leaps out from a careful comparison is the finding that Democratic voter turnout fell through the floor. Trump didn’t win those counties because people switched their votes to him; he won because significant numbers of people who voted for Biden in 2020 did not vote at all in 2024. Just as is the case in medicine, an effective treatment requires an accurate diagnosis. The anemic Democratic voter turnout is the result of a cataclysmic failure of theory of change, strategy and spending, most notably by the Democratic Super Pac Future Forward. Future Forward embraced the view that they could devise clever television and digital ads that would persuade Trump-leaning voters to back the Democrats. Accordingly, they poured nearly $700m into an advertising avalanche that was redundant to Harris’s ads and obviously ineffective. The work of defending and ultimately taking back the country starts now, and a sober assessment of the election results makes clear that 2024 marks the requiem for the widely held but thinly supported view that it makes more sense to invest in persuasion over the power-building program of getting out the vote."
BTC leads collective of progressive creators with plan to take back the internet from Joe Rogan and the right-wing machine
Chorus: This election has made it painfully clear that Democrats' messages are just not getting through the tsunami of right-wing propaganda and lies flooding through social media, and we have no real answer to a Joe Rogan or a Ben Shapiro...until now! Chorus Collective is a new collaborative founded by creators like Brian Tyler Cohen, Leigh McGowan (Politics Girl), Roland Martin, David Pakman, Elizabeth Booker Houston, and Adam Mockler, who are bringing their audience of 40 million people together to create a new infrastructure to scale their voices and build support for more creators like them. Chorus aims to not only amplify progressive voices but also uplift new creators and build a left-wing social media ecosystem that supports its voices ALL the time, not just in the months leading up to an election. Will you chip in to help Chorus get off the ground and help break the right-wing stranglehold on social media?
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