Schumer is part of an old american politics where there was a cordial relationship between both sides and the cost of sacrificing the interests of the constituents was largely negligible - no one knew what was going on so no one could complain (pre-24hr news cycle and pre infinite news outlets online or in public). Times changed. People notice everything. Schumer is not built for this time where everything he does is under a microscope and where consequences are seen and felt. He is acting as if he can just pretend that things are like they were in the 90s where he can show up, gladhand with donors and his colleagues across the isle, cash a check, work 4 months out of the year, and insider trade. He cant. The problem is that he is also intrinsically part of the democratic party machinery so no one can force him out. He needs to be primaried at a minimum.

Most americans dont engage with politics on this level if they engage at all.

There is a long list of people complicit in the current spiral towards dictatorship. Mueller, Comey, Roberts, Biden, Obama, Cheney (rest in piss)… Our current situation is the consequence of a rotten society. Trump is just a symptom.

Their plan is the same as it ever was. Rich people can afford the best care. Everyone else can die. This plan is not super marketable so that is why they wont make this more transparent.

I cannot now remember who said it, but it perfectly captured the problem with Trump:

“With Donald Trump, there are many questions, but no mysteries.”

We dont need the epstein files, and we certainly are not going to get them; not unaltered at least. Regardless, we know what is in there. Not everything, but everything we need to know with respect to Trump. At this point, his supporters do not care about the facts as far as Trump is concerned. We have to stop hoping that something is going to rescue us from Trump’s grip on our reality. Nothing will. All that is left is for us to act.

I’m surprisingly easy to please. You just need to semi-consistently represent the interests of your constituents. Easy peasy. Jeffries has been called to endorse Mamdani since July. He waited until the last few days before the election, instead of actively dissuading Cuomo from running by endorsing the clear primary winner. As a result, Mamdani spent the entire summer having to deal with attacks from someone in his own party rather than expounding on his (extremely popular) platform.

It is generally a bad sign for a party that wants to call itself ‘Democrat’ to reject the clear democratic will of the people in your own primary. Call me unreasonable for noticing.

What a cowardly bitch. Waited for the last possible moment once it was clear he had no other choice. God I hate Hakeem Jeffries.

Libs dont have a coherent moral or political worldview. They are preoccupied with aesthetics and decorum. It is why the libs will not be involved in material change for the better. They simply lack the imagination or will.

EDIT: I worry that people are taking that I am on the side of the Trump admin. I am to the left of the democrats and that is the basis for my disappointment and criticism.

Her career is not characterized by a principled commitment to leftist or even anti-imperialist values. She exists precisely to spoil elections in a first past the post system.

No chance anything that actually attacks inequality ever gets implemented through existing legislative channels.

Protests that are legal, time-limited, and non-disruptive while also having no specific demands are just angry parades. And while it can be personally cathartic to be around like minded people, this does literally nothing to affect material change. Instead, millions of people who were motivated to engage in political action have now spent a couple of hours walking around, chanting, reading signs made by others, have let off some of the built up pressure that might have otherwise motivated them to do something real. Imagine if 1% of the protestors who turned out yesterday blocked access to ICE facilities instead? Or donated time and money to feeding homeless people. Or donated time and money to helping immigrants (documented and otherwise) increase access to legal services. Imagine if instead everyone of those people decided to strike from their jobs until the shutdown was ended and healthcare funded indefinitely? My ideas are not the best ones out there, but they are all probably more impactful to real people than anything that happened yesterday.

Conversely, how many more brown people were disappeared off the streets by ICE while everyone was distracted with the no kings protest? What new, corrupt, immoral, expenditure of our tax dollars was allocated to some horrible imperialist cause or Trump ally? How many people who depend on govt services had to go without because the shutdown was in place? You get the idea.

Effective protest is disruptive, time-unbounded, and usually illegal. They always have specific demands like ending a war, passing a bill, or freeing the unjustly imprisoned, etc. I am glad that people were motivated to turn out. I am sad that they turned out for an angry parade.

Sure, but cells of disruptive activists are not the foundations of a nationally effective movement. You need a way for normies to show up and help. And placating their activist impulses with a demonstration of discontent while not also offering real channels for affecting change is a way of castrating collective action. That’s my two cents, at least.

Right, and private mockery contains the verisimilitude of their intent. They may not be ready to spin up a gas chamber but their chats are fully representative of their attitudes about millions of americans and fully serves as a legitimate basis of criticism and derision.

What people believe in the privacy of their minds is between them and their conscience. What people do is as much a representation of their beliefs, and more fundamentally representative of themselves than anything else. In other words, i do not have to prove anything about Putin’s beliefs or Russia’s beliefs (as if such a thing were possible). I merely have to prove that they act as if they have. That is much easier and more relevant - and most crucially, it is already evident.

It is almost as if the public criticism of antifascism is in bad faith.

You are aware that proof doesnt get more solid than repeated, collectively witnessed, action, right? A direct testament from Putin would be less significant than the current record of military intervention.

If the current trajectory of russian aggression has not yet convinced you, if Georgia’s annexation has not yet convinced you, if Transnistria has not convinced you, if Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kherson have not convinced you (despite pro-russian separatists in the region serving as erstwhile justification for annexation) then I do not know what to tell you.

I appreciate your capacity for giving people the benefit of the doubt. It is an honorable quality…but you have some context - these are the private chats of conservative staffers communicating in private. I can tell you, as someone who has been in private work chats, that there is room for irony but these chats are not using gas chamber imagery because they really believe in the intrinsic dignity of minority groups.

Crimea and eastern Ukraine would like to have a word with you as of 4 years ago.

Mobilization is not organization. Those in power already know the people are dissatisfied. They dont care. None of us are doing enough to make it their problem. We do not have the spaces to organize the kinds of actions that would be effective. Even this platform is not safe enough to talk about what needs to be done. It is too late. They won.