The MAGA Republican victory unleashed by Donald Trump’s return to the White House has understandably extended to many of my most hostile correspondents. They urge me to bow to the president and accept his victory as a mandate against all that is disparaging about the progressive left. An argument that centuries of racial and gender discrimination won’t magically disappear without intervention, a group that says all Americans should have health insurance, a group that says all Americans should have health insurance, an extremely The rich should pay significant taxes and that we are proudly a nation of immigrants.
They believe that instead of us having an alien invasion on our southern border and those here illegally imposing a reign of terror and raising the cost of goods and services, they are somehow changing the lives of others. I hope it will make it better. I hope they agree that they are holding back Russian aggression by helping Ukraine’s defense be a waste of American treasure. They want me to believe that climate change poses no existential threat.
Often they accuse me of portraying democratic talking points. I’m a registered Democrat, but that’s the extent of my affiliation with the party. I have also been accused of being a “socialist”. I think they mean I’m a big supporter of Medicare and Social Security. Even the short-lived “Tea Party” movement embraced socialism in that sense.
Essentially, my critics want me to admit that I was wrong to oppose Trump and his policies because he won.
I never do. And at least half the country feels the same way, including most of California.
“There is no obligation,” UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavrek said Thursday at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior Seminar on “Hate and Politics.” (The institute’s “Open Minds” program offers free, remotely accessible, one-hour seminars that explore a wide range of mental health issues with experts from a variety of fields.)
Vavreck said the last few presidential elections have demonstrated that the electorate is “calcified” and there is “rough parity” between the number of Democrats and Republicans. This means that the relatively small number of voters who do not identify with either party has not become extremely important.
For these voters, “an ‘out’ party seems like an attractive option” who are dissatisfied with the country’s state, Vavreck said. Therefore, Joe Biden would likely have won in 2020 primarily due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and Trump would have won in 2024 primarily due to inflation. In any case, Vavreck repeated: “There is no mission.”
My political views and deepest ideals remain the same. Because I elected a man who elected a man who is trying to organize a return to a time when rich white men ruled the world, and my political views and deepest ideals remain the same. When married, when women couldn’t serve in combat, and when the United States could act as if the rest of the world didn’t actually exist. My parents – one religiously devout and the other an atheist taught me more than that.
I criticize the cruel and inert policies of a president who cannot have mercy on a woman of God and be publicly admonished without falling into a tantrum more suitable for a toddler than a 78 year old. I’m not going to stop – Old Man. Bishop Marian Edgar Badet’s plea against Trump during a prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral on Tuesday, following his criminal “hush money” trial in New York last spring. It reminded me. His him of 34 felonies. He wore the same disgusted look on both occasions.
Trump is rarely taken prisoner. Bade bravely seized the opportunity to show what true spiritual leadership looks like.
“I didn’t ask him for anything,” Budd later told The New York Times. “I was pleading with him, can you see the humanity in these people? Are the people in this country scary?”
The reaction of the MAGA world? Off with her head!
“She was nasty in tone, persuasive, and not clever,” Trump wrote of The Society of Truth. “She and her church owe the public an apology!”
The bishop refused to oblige, saying, “I do not apologize for what I said.”
Over the next four years, I stand with all the “awkward women” (and men and non-binary people for that matter).
Bluesky: @rabcarian.bsky.social. Thread: @Rabcarian
Source link
