Democrats, Shut the Fuck Up and Vote for the Democratic Nominee

When three Democratic candidates supported by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Democrat, won their Democratic primaries last week, the reaction of the center and right of the Democratic Party was, at least in the telling of political media, a deranged fucking freak-out. Driven, as such things are, by nutzoid conservative media declaring, in essence, that the savage Hottentots have overrun the civilized colonists and are eating the women and raping the dogs, supposed moderate after supposed moderate lined up to say that Democratic voters are idiots for supporting someone who believes the same things they do on issues like taxes, health care, and, yes, the alleged third rail, Israel, and that the party faces ruin for going so radically left. 

It behooves us to pause for a moment to consider that barely any actual radical leftists exist in the United States. Radical leftists would be calling for the execution of oil executives and the bombing of fossil fuel producing sites. They would go full communist and demand the seizure and redistribution of wealth, as well as state or worker takeover of industries, depending on which flavor of commie they are. It would be an army of Luigi Mangiones or people who believe similar things about the failure of capitalism to address the needs of humanity. That's extremism. 

You know what's not extremist? New York's Brad Lander's platform. Lander defeated incumbent Congressman Dan Goldman, with Goldman's support for Israel being a major factor in his loss. Lander wants to pass a bill ending support for Israel as long as the country is violating international law, which, sorry, sure doesn't seem out-there unless you don't give a shit about such things. On other issues, Lander proposes sane, left-of-center policies that enjoy majority support in the country, like implementing Medicare for All, raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and abolishing ICE. 

If you look at the supposedly most radical of the trio of Mamdani-backed candidates, Darializa Avila Chevalier, who defeated incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, you get...someone who pretty much backs the same everyday liberal policies that Lander (and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and AOC and many others) backs. Wanna know some of her crazy ideas? "Raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour" and "Establish free universal childcare and Pre-K" and "Prohibit Congress members from trading stocks." Wacky, no? She has some things that are pie-in-the-sky policies to shoot for, like guaranteed minimum income and "Create a four-day 32-hour work week with no loss in pay." But, again, none of this is outside of left-wing of the Democratic Party conversation. If Chevalier had said, "Nationalize the auto companies" and "take away children and raise them in communes," then maybe it would have been justified for carbuncle of doom James Carville to go on Fox "news," for fuck's sake, and say that Democrats should not "seat her as a member of the Democratic Party." 

As for her old tweets that have considerably more actually far left viewpoints, who the fuck cares? Man, it's Twitter. Everyone shits the bed on Twitter. Everyone says fucked up things to piss people off. And even if they really believe it, it doesn't mean a candidate is gonna run on the wildest things they believe (even if, truth be told, I agree with Chevalier on a bunch of it). She shit on Democrats as much as she shit on the right. Jesus fuck, Trump is executing people without charge, arrest, or trial, and we're wasting time talking about if a candidate still believes her grad school political theory or if she meant it when she said, "Defund the police." Fuck off, John Fetterman. 

You know what's not real, though? The freakout I mentioned at the top. Even in the Politico article I linked to titled, "Centrist Democrats are freaking out about progressives’ winning streak," the actual freak out is less screaming and running through the streets naked except for a stuffed Care Bear stuck on your dick (we've all been there, right?), and more, "Oh, I guess we need to adjust our perspective for the next election."  The article has quotes from "centrists" who say things like, "Yeah, those Democratic socialists sure have been getting well-organized. We should do that more." It's also got quotes from progressives saying that centrism hasn't been working and that's why voters want people who, as I said, believe what they believe. (And the article notes all the establishment Democrats who did win their primaries, which also makes a shit fit over progressive wins seem dumb.)

At the end of the day, Democratic voters (or, you know, all voters) need to do what's right, and that's shut the fuck up and vote for the Democratic nominee. That's all you have. Democratic nominee or more destruction. If you're a "moderate" (which I think just means you support Israel and don't want to tax rich people quite as much), shut the fuck up and vote for the progressive nominee, even if it's a Democratic socialist, because you have no other choice, you simpering genocide-enablers. If you're a Democratic socialist or liberal populist, shut the fuck up and vote for the moderate nominee. And, yeah, that might mean you have to suck it up on Israel because you have no other fucking choice, you fucking smug nihilists.

As for centrist elected Democrats, stop giving fuel to the right-wing fire about supposedly "communist" candidates. Welcome the left and let them drag the party back to what it's supposed to be: a place that seeks to make sure everyone gets a shot and treats people with compassion and care, not Republican-lite, not trying to compromise with crazed fascists or doing Stephen Miller's work for him. And stop being assholes who act all cozy with the same Republicans who cheer on the torture of migrants and the denial of rights to women and LGBTQ+ people. Maybe these alleged wild and woolly leftists can lead the party to its soul again. 

Remember: The Republican Congress Is Also Responsible for the Reflecting Pool Debacle (and Everything Else)

Donald Trump never wants anything "fixed." He wants it remade in his image. It doesn't matter if what he's doing to something helps it or not. What matters is he can slap his shitty name on it and pretend it's his. It's even better when he can take something someone else built or had dedicated to them and take credit after doing nothing or very little or just fucking it up completely. I think a lot about the time in 1996 that Trump just showed up at the ribbon-cutting for a nursery school for kids with HIV. He hadn't given a goddamn nickel, but he bullied his way in and sat in the front row so he could be in all the photos and pretend he was a decent human being when he was just 250 pounds of shit in an ill-fitting suit. (Lower weight because he was thinner in the 90s.) Does nothing, takes credit. 

Of course, that was when Trump was a loser CEO of a constantly bankrupt or near-bankrupt company with no shareholders, no one to be responsible to except the greed of himself, his shitty children, and the few employees he actually gave enough of a shit about to pay off for being accomplices to all his crimes. And no one to hold him to account unless they got through his layers of lawyers and goons and frivolous lawsuits and threats.  

That's not the case with the presidency. The way shit is supposed to work is that the Congress is supposed to step in and say, "No, fuck you, you can't do that and we won't fund it." Congressional committees are supposed to dig into it when the White House just wantonly does crimes. Yeah, it wouldn't matter if they made referrals to the Justice Department for prosecution because the DOJ now exists as Trump's spooge cloth, but that's not the point. When the next funding bill comes up, you specify that you're not spending money on it. Power of the pursestrings, motherfuckers. If Congress does nothing about disastrous shit when it could do something, then it owns the disasters. 

And under current Republican leadership in the House and, for the most part, in the Senate, the position of the Congress has been prone, supine, or recumbent, just fucking laying there to be stepped over, stomped on, ignored, or, if necessary, fucked by Trump and his Executive Branch minions. As Trump is justifiably blamed for debacle after debacle, for fuck-up after fuck-up, we cannot lose sight of the fact that every single Republican (save the occasional Massie or Murkowski vote) needs to be blamed, too. 

Take, for instance, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Sure, it needed updates because that's how shit works when you've gotta take care of a pool. Equipment fails, conditions change, and other things happen where you gotta do repairs to keep it pretty. But Trump had to fuck with it and pretend like he knew anything at all about what he was doing. You know he wanted it painted "American Flag Blue," which is dumb and embarrassing and grotesque like this entire era we're damned to live through. You know he gave the no-bid contract to whatever corrupt cartoon character most recently greased the skids. He broke at least three laws by barreling ahead without required bidding on the project and without required environmental and historic preservation reviews, and, without congressional action to halt it, an outside group has sued. But Trump now argues that suit is moot because the project is "complete" (even though it is far from complete). So crimes be damned, right? 

Congress owns the green algae and the peeling paint because Republicans let Trump get away with it. However, none of the articles I've read about this incredibly symbolic failure mention that the House and Senate abdicated their responsibility and thus are accessories to the crimes here. They are covered in toxic slime and paint sludge as much as Trump is. 

The same goes for every law, big and small, cavalierly broken by Trump and his mobster administration. Republicans in Congress let Trump take over the power of the purse; they said nothing as he ignored laws on bidding for contracts and more for his concentration camps; they let him tear down a third of the White House without even a head shake; they do nothing about the constant execution of people who have been charged with no crimes, let alone convicted; they let all of the human rights abuses, all of the civil rights abuses, all of the war crimes, all of the reaming of the rule of law happen; they let all his plainly illegal executive orders stand without a word; a few barely squeaked out a protest about the Iran war, but that was primarily Democrats voting for it. Congress has a goddamn job, and it's not to be Trump's penis koozie. 

And here's the thing: Mike Johnson or John Thune could have said, "Hey, we're gonna agree to all this shit. But just follow the law." It sucks, but at least a fig leaf is better than standing naked for the world to laugh at your little dong. But they didn't. So it's all on them, too, and campaigns and coverage need to make their inaction as important as Trump's actions. Because, see, he thinks he's making everything in his image, but every single thing he's done also reflects back on them, too. Every failure, every disgrace, every nightmare, every death, every crime is theirs, too. Hang it all on them until it breaks their political necks.

On Immigration, Embrace What They Hate, Democrats

My political theory is simple: most people are fucking idiots. They have the attention span of sugar-filled toddlers given free rein in a wrecked Toys R Us who, after they are done screaming for a while, fall asleep on the pile of moldy dolls they stacked up. They don't care if their rampage hurts them or anyone else as long as they get to rampage, and when they wake up from their naps, they are ready for the next rampage.

The job of politicians is to harness that disruptive energy and focus it on issues that matter. The problem, of course, is who is doing the harnessing and what are their issues. See, one way to read the rise and inevitable fall of Donald Trump is that he injected himself into the US electoral bloodstream and it was a jolt of newness for many voters (yeah, I know, we all knew who he was and what a piece of shit he has always been, but remember: most people are fucking idiots), and idiot voters who had backed Barack Obama's Hope and Change were tired of needing to give a shit about other people and loved being told they could be shitty again. See, the problem is that newness only lasts for so long and you have to evolve and offer something new again. Trump has not done that. He repeats the same shit endlessly, his grievances have never shifted, and his execution of his ideas has been utter garbage.

On the other end of the spectrum on this idea is the fast rise of progressive Democratic candidates in places where they haven't previously made in-roads. You know this is new because some candidates endorsed by traditional, moderate Democrats are losing primaries. Not all, and certainly the establishment hasn't lost all its influence, but there's a real thirst out there for those who are talking about populist ideas in ways that are not trying to appeal to some mythical Republican who wants to walk away from Trump and his MAGA cretin army. 

In other words, voters are craving someone to show them a different way to see the world, perhaps even a better way to see it. That's why the payoff is so slim when Democrats give credence to Republican madness on issues like immigration, LGBTQ rights, education, and, well, pretty much everything. You don't have to hand it to the GOP. You don't have to pretend that they have a point when they pretty fucking clearly do not. 

So there is a plain opening here for Democrats who speak about immigration not through a lens of deportation and criminality but by concentrating on the good of immigrants to the country, the necessity of continued population expansion, and the foundational American aspect of a constant influx of people from around the world. After 10 years of Trump's savagery about and towards immigrants and anyone who supports them, with all the energy that it takes to constantly hate and desire to punish them, it's a fucking relief to hear that you don't have to keep hating, that you can, in fact, accept and even love the vast majority of immigrants who just want to make their lives and thus all of our lives better. There's a huge swath of the population that's begging for that message, unmitigated by nods to "enforcement" of border laws and how many people have been deported, offering a counternarrative to the parade of grotesque crimes committed by migrants, as if no white people commit them, too. 

The same could be said for other issues, like the treatment of transgender kids and adults. That's why it's so disappointing when, say, Texas Senate nominee James "Hot Women Like Compassionate Dudes" Talarico said in an interview that he agrees that children should not get gender reassignment surgery. You know how many kids under 18 get that operation on their genitals? Virtually none, and it's usually for medical necessity. The number receiving top surgery is extraordinarily low, too.  There is no reason to say anything other than "I trust parents and doctors" when asked "Do you support trans mutilization of children?" or whatever President Fucko says. 

But let me focus here on immigration. I'm in the UK right now, and parts of the country are losing their fucking minds over an immigrant from Sudan attacking a white man in Belfast with a knife, on top of an earlier crime from December where a young white man was stabbed to death by a Sikh man, both born in the UK. The killer in that case was sentence to life in prison on June 1. Racist fucknuts, led by the worst pieces of shit like Nigel Farage, Elon Musk, and his hate buddy, Tommy Robinson, have been calling for violence against immigrants and non-whites, and shit got real in Belfast where homes and cars were burned down and people had to flee for their lives. Other outbreaks of bullshit happened in Scotland and elsewhere. They were smaller incidents, but thank fuck the World Cup is starting so that these assholes can focus their savagery away from families and onto the teams of other countries. By the way, there were over 500 violent knife crimes in the last year in NI, but no one had a race riot when Seamus shanked Liam over a broken shillelagh or whatever the fuck they do there. 

And while it's good to hear condemnation coming from Labour politicians and others, it's frankly galling that Prime Minister Keir Starmer and most of the party has spent the better part of two years trying to out-asshole the right on immigration into the UK. The same goes for Democrats in the US who still think bragging about how many people were deported under President Obama is a strategy to convince voters who are totally cool with concentration camps to vote for Dems. In case you don't remember, most Democrats were actually pissed about Obama's mass deportations back in the 2010s.

This isn't that fucking complicated. Democrats don't have to make "border security" the top item in their discussion of immigration policy because no matter what, the GOP is going to say they want open borders. Instead, make the case that immigration is who we are. Make it so that immigrants are celebrated, even if they came here and stayed without going through the absolutely insane immigration system we have. Not to solely focus on Talarico, but on this count, he's got one of the more immigrant-positive sets of policies. 

By offering this alternative to the bullshit the right keeps forcing on Americans, Democrats can say that we all get to chill the fuck out. Goddamn, don't you want to chill out over people who are your neighbors and co-workers and the people who works really friggin' hard? 

What's happening in the UK right now is what the racist dickscabs who work for the Trump administration and run Congress and ejaculate hate all over Twitter/X want to happen in the US. Hell, it's the policy of ICE to do everything short of burn down the homes of undocumented migrants. 

But voters love it when you offer an easier path. Shit, just tell them that the taxes paid by the undocumented will help save Social Security. Greed is always the greatest motivator.