All I’m saying is maybe MAYBE if we had voted in Harris we would still be fighting her for things but they would be semi close to reasonable things. Not things like “please don’t annex greenland” or “please don’t mass deport immigrants from sanctuary cities” or “please dont take away no fault divorce”. Shit, if people had showed the fuck up WE COULD’VE SECURED THE HOUSE AND SENATE!
Do you get that? We could’ve had a relatively easy 4 years to actually build a coalition, to get candidates ready for 2026 and 2028 that could challenge our established congress. Public servants that work for us, not for corporations, with all the oversight and scrutiny of a YouTubers Discord mod’s unflinching eye. We could have done that with relative peace while petitioning for normalish things like school lunches and rollback of book bans and common sense gun legislation and stacking the court.
But now we are gonna be running interference for a million fucking shitshows all at once. Demoralization was step one, now we’re onto full destabilization and invasion.
A sticker found on a street sign on the corner of Constance and Aline Streets in the East Riverside neighborhood of New Orleans, in southeast Louisiana, USA.
An oil billionaire made his wishes known. The president-elect delivered.
Excerpt from this story from Mother Jones:
Americans of a certain age tend to throw around the term “Orwellian” willy-nilly. But the expression really suits in describing the behavior of our felonious, twice-impeached president-elect.
In George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, a dictatorship represented by the all-powerful “Big Brother” dictates the reality its citizens must adhere to, however topsy-turvy. Official slogans include “ignorance is strength,” “freedom is slavery,” and “war is peace.”
In this context, another slogan comes to mind: “Drain the swamp.”
Trump didn’t invent this populist expression, but he made it a centerpiece of his first campaign—a vow to rid DC of the toxic influence of special interest money, lobbyists, etc. Of course, politicians of both parties have long railed, often without much credibility, against special interests in Washington, and the US Supreme Court’s trashing of campaign finance safeguards has indeed created a cesspool of oligarchic influence in DC that crosses party lines.
It’s not the slogan itself that’s Orwellian. The Orwellian part is Trump’s evocation of the Swamp as he appoints foxes to guard the federal henhouse yet again. It’s a trolling of the libs, but a trolling with potentially dire consequences—and a signal that our government is for sale, more openly now than ever.
Exhibit A: Trump’s selection of Chris Wright, the CEO of a Denver fracking services company called Liberty Energy, for the position of energy secretary. Wright has no government experience and certainly no experience related to the nuclear weapons whose oversight is a critical part of DOE’s role.
Meanwhile, as typical of Trump’s cabinet picks to date, Wright’s other qualifications for the job are—to use Orwellian “Newspeak”—doubleplusungood.
It has escaped nobody’s notice that Trump’s top consideration in doling out key positions is loyalty to the boss. For attorney general, he chose Matt Gaetz, an inexperienced lawyer (but fierce loyalist) who has been accused of sexual impropriety—no charges were ever filed—and is notorious for allegedly foisting upon House colleagues videos of women he’s bedded. For his director of national intelligence, Trump picked Tulsi Gabbard, a former congresswoman my colleague Dan Friedman describes as a “uniquely bad choice.” Namely, she lacks intelligence experience and is so in sync with Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine that her nomination was even celebrated on Russian television. To oversee White House communications, he picked a bomb-thrower who cut his teeth at UFC. For Health, he chose Robert Kennedy Jr., a man with no academic expertise in the areas he would oversee, and whose views and priorities are far from the mainstream, as my colleague David Corn has reported. (In this administration, apparently, ignorance is indeed strength.)
Wright, too, is a loyalist, but this pick feels distinctly transactional—Swamplike. Trump, after all, met multiple times during his campaign with top fossil-fuel CEOs, promising that, if they gave him money and helped him get elected, they would be richly rewarded. Wright, who denies the climate crisis and completely dismisses the US clean energy transition—which is weird, because it is well under way, despite the fossil fuel industry’s attempts to thwart it—is the industry’s reward. As was Trump’s choice for Interior, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgham, who is apparently champing at the bit to expand drilling on federal land.
The New York Times reports that Wright’s wife, Liz, co-hosted a Trump fund-raiser in Montana, and that the couple donated a total of $350,000 to a Trump campaign committee. Most notably, Wright was the preferred choice of oil billionaire Harold Hamm, a major Trump donor and co-host of gatherings where candidate Trump wooed oil executives with what sounded suspiciously like a pay-to-play pitch.
