Another Dark Ages on the Way?
...it's twilight now...IT'S UP TO US TO KEEP THE LIGHTS ON
We’ve seen this movie before: campus unrest gave us Ronald Reagan as CA guv, Nixon as US prez…let’s not create a re-run
I attended college between September 1968 and May 1972. It was a turbulent time. Assassinations, racial tension, riots in our cities, opposition to the war in Viet Nam…this all led to demonstrations on many campuses, some of which turned violent, either because of student aggressiveness or brutal reactions by the authorities.
Like today’s campus protests there were both good intentions and bad actors taking advantage of the situation. I saw that first hand back then, and I am witnessing it from afar now.
Some history that I hope campus protesters will remember is that such unrest taken to an extreme gave us Ronald Reagan as Governor of California in 1966,1 launching his political climb. In that same era Richard Nixon took advantage of the unrest to position himself as the “law and order” candidate who would champion the interests of the “silent majority.”
So by all means have your say, but do it peacefully and respectfully, and for God’s sake don’t let opposition to policies of the Israeli government turn into anti-semitism.
R’s keep committing to pull another January 6
It has now become an act of faith in the Republican tribe — unless you deny the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election you will be cast out. It’s been reported that anyone applying for a job at the Trumpified RNC will be rejected if they fail to say that the election was stolen from Trump. And in recent months it has become a necessity for the pathetic sycophants vying to be Trump’s VP running mate to refuse to say whether they would “accept” electoral results if they lose, and continue to call the 2020 results into question. See this pathetic act by Tim Scott (Sen.-SC).
WHY THE HECK DOES THE MEDIA KEEP ASKING THESE GUYS IF THEY WILL ACCEPT ELECTION REULTS? They asked Trump in 2016 and 2020; they’re asking again now. The results are there, they’re real, who the hell cares if Trump “won’t commit to accepting election results” if he loses. Such questions only encourage and empower these corrupt liars. I never asked my Little League teams if they wanted to “accept” the final score.
Plainly biased — if not corrupt — judges keep saving Trump’s bacon
First of all, it was bad enough that SCOTUS even saw the need to consider Trump’s appeal in his “absolute immunity” case (we wrote about that here and here) when so many legal experts lauded the reasoning of the lower courts.
But then a couple of weeks ago the Supreme Court presided over a bizarre set of oral arguments in the case that seemed to show a majority of them angling for some way to absolve Trump of paying a price for his attempted coup. As Adam Liptak reported on Justice Alito’s line of thinking: in the NY Times:
Immunity is needed, [Alito] said, to make sure the incumbent president has reason to “leave office peacefully” after losing an election.
Justice Alito explained: “If an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?”
In other words, Alito feigns to be concerned that a “future” president might stage a coup out of fear he’d be prosecuted for….something… More concerned about that hypothetical than he seems to be about seeing justice done in the case of a REAL past president who initiated a failed coup simply to retain power…more concerned about that hypothetical despite the fact that over some 230 years and 45 presidents such an attempt has happened…once. More on that here.
That’s bad enough…but then the wet-behind-the-ears Trump-appointed FL judge Aileen Cannon continued her quest to shield Trump from even getting into court to defend himself in the stolen documents case. She’s delayed and derailed an open-and-shut case that should have been decided a year ago. We wrote about that weeks ago, here.
It is getting pretty hard to have faith in the justice system…capturing and compromising the judiciary is a fundamental play in the Authoritarian’s Handbook, and it looks like the MAGA Republicans are on their way.
As the Vietnam War expanded and the death toll climbed, students at Berkeley launched a determined and, at times, confrontational attempt to stop the war with demonstrations and protests that eventually spread to college campuses across the country. Years later, much of the public came to agree with the students but in 1966, those opposed to the war were a distinct minority in America. Candidate Reagan capitalized on this. -Ronald Reagan launched political career using the Berkeley campus as a target, UCBerkeleyNews by Jeffery Kahn, NewsCenter | 8 June 2004