#dixiecrat

[renegadeurbanmediasource]

More White Conservaturd Hypocrisy

Yeah, the nerve of Ali! He’s a Black man, but he’s not allowed to eat in certain restaurants or drink at certain water fountains. If he takes the bus he has to sit in the back. He sees other Blacks on TV getting beaten, attacked by police dogs and fire hoses and heads split open with nightsticks! Yet he won’t go fight for another nation’s freedom for their people to do what he’s not allowed to do…

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#amerikka #antiblackracism #conservatives #crt #democrats #dixiecrat #lester maddox #maga #muhammad ali #republicans #segregation #trump #white hypocrisy #white lies #white privilege #white supremacy

[qupritsuvwix]

#1962 #racism #mississippi #pz myers #dixiecrat

[slimethought]

The first 1000 people who click the link will get 2 free months of Skillshare Premium: https://skl.sh/stepbackhistory11

Dinesh D'Souza is an infamous right-wing provocateur. In 2016 he published an 'expose' on the Democratic party which not only misrepresents the history it covers but belies a darker motive.

Experts: Dr Rob MacDougall - University of Western Ontario Dr Joseph Aistrup - Auburn University

Gust Voices: News Reporter - Elliot Dawson (AndarNation Propaganda)    / @redletterdaze118   Makayla Kennedy - Irene (nocommentchick)   / nocommentchick   Dinesh D'Souza - Radical Reviewer    / @radicalreviewer   DNC Staffer - Kelly Barnes Mia Mulder - Mia Mulder    / @miamulder  

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Sources: Interview with Dr Joseph Aistrup Interview with Dr Robert MacDougall Aistrup, Joseph A. The southern strategy revisited: Republican top-down advancement in the South (University Press of Kentucky, 2015). Applebome, Peter. Dixie Rising: How the South is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture (ISBN 0-15-600550-6). Bass, Jack. The transformation of southern politics: Social change and political consequence since 1945 (University of Georgia Press, 1995). Black, Earl and Merle Black. The Rise of Southern Republicans (Harvard University Press, 2003). X Brewer, Mark D., and Jeffrey M. Stonecash. "Class, race issues, and declining white support for the Democratic Party in the South." Political Behavior 23#2 (2001): 131–55. Carter, Dan T. The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, The Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of Southern Politics (ISBN 0-8071-2597-0). Perlstein, Rick. Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2009). Taylor, Jeff. Where Did the Party Go?: William Jennings Bryan, Hubert Humphrey, and the Jeffersonian Legacy (2006) Witcover, Jules. Party of the People: A History of the Democrats (2003) Chace, James (2004). 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft, and Debs—The Election That Changed the Country. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-7432-0394-1. Flehinger, Brett. The 1912 Election and the Power of Progressivism: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2003). Gould, Lewis L. Four hats in the ring: The 1912 election and the birth of modern American politics (Univ Pr of Kansas, 2008). Milkis, Sidney M. Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Democracy. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2009. O'Mara, Margaret. Pivotal Tuesdays: Four Elections That Shaped the Twentieth Century (2015)

~-~~-~~~-~~-~ Please watch: "A LOT of Cops Join Far-Right Militias"    • A LOT of Cops Join Far-Right Militias   ~-~~-~~~-~~-~

#Eyeball Zone #Step Back #Dinesh D'Souza #democrats #nationalism #racisim #history #civil war #jim crow #Westward expansion #republicans #gilded age #progressive #eugenics #conservative #dixiecrat #civil rights

[whatisonthemoon]

Strom Thurmond: Wishy Washy Racist Defender of Moon

Senator Strom Thurmond, Dixiecrat turned Republican, vehement racist and segregationist who is responsible for the longest filibuster that went over 24 hours (over the Civil Rights Act of 1957), played an ESSENTIAL role in giving Sun Myung Moon the OK to come to the United States. Though in 1974, Thurmond forwarded the concerns of parents of Moonies to the FBI, he remained in Moon’s network, having his aides at UC events through the decades, even attending himself. 

Thurmond is also known for assaulting and harassing women, as well as fathering a child with his 16 year old Black servant. 

#U.S. politics #republican #republican party #democratic party #dixiecrat #strom thurmond #usa #racism #anti-blackness #white supremacy

[odinsblog]

Look for the enemies of Medicare, of higher minimum wages, of Social Security, of Federal aid to education, and there you will find the enemy of the Negro, the coalition of Dixiecrats and reactionary Republicans that seek to dominate the Congress.

—A. Philip Randolph, speaking at The March on Washington 60 years ago

#prescient #a philip randolph #civil rights #dixiecrats #republicans #march on washington #i have a dream #living wages #social security #education #a. philip randolph

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

#us politics #memes #shitpost #us history #southern strategy #southern democrats #dixiecrats #kkk #ku klux klan #the parties switched #lee atwater #president richard nixon #racism #racists #paul manafort #roger stone #bigots be like #republicans be like #conservatives be like

[deadpresidents]

Carter has passed Garner! He now holds ALL the records for anyone who has ever been President or VP! Only Alf Landon's still stands and he was never President!

Yes, you are correct! Jimmy Carter has now passed John Nance Garner on the list of longest-living Presidents or Vice Presidents (here was that list at the beginning of September). And we are 10 days away from President Carter becoming the first President or Vice President to ever celebrate their 99th birthday. Not bad for a guy who has been in hospice care since February.

And, yes, Alf Landon is the longest-living major party nominee for President or Vice President. Landon was the 1936 Republican Presidential nominee and lost the general election to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Landon was 100 years, 33 days old when he died in 1987. Think about that for a second: Alf Landon was the Republican Presidential nominee when FDR ran for his second term as President, and Landon died when Ronald Reagan had a little over a year left in his Presidency!

BUT, it's worth nothing that while Alf Landon is undoubtedly the longest-living Presidential or Vice Presidential nominee by a major party, he is NOT the longest-living person to ever win Electoral votes as President or Vice President.

In 1948, many Southern Democrats opposed to support for civil rights in the party's platform at the Democratic National Convention bolted from the party and formed the States' Rights or "Dixiecrat" party to run against incumbent Democratic President Harry S. Truman and Republican nominee Thomas Dewey. The Dixiecrats nominated South Carolina Governor (and future longtime Senator) Strom Thurmond as their Presidential nominee. Despite not being a major party nominee, Thurmond and the Dixiecrats, relying on voters in former Confederate strongholds in the South, performed better in the general election than just about any third-party Presidential candidate of the 20th Century.

Thurmond and the Dixiecrats won 4 states and 39 Electoral votes in 1948. In 1936, Republican nominee Alf Landon won two states and just 8 Electoral votes. So Thurmond's racist, third-party challenge performed far better than the GOP nominee had done twelve years earlier.

So, unfortunately, while we're talking about longest-living President or Vice Presidential nominees, we have to throw Strom Thurmond in the conversation considering the fact that he won far more Electoral votes in 1948 than Alf Landon did in 1936. And Thurmond lived longer, as well. Thurmond was 100 years, 203 days old when he died in 2003 -- he lived 170 days longer than Alf Landon did.

Thurmond is also almost certainly the oldest person to ever be one of the top officials in the Presidential line of succession. As I mentioned, Thurmond eventually served in the U.S. Senate from South Carolina -- a seat that he held from 1954-2003 (except for a period of about 7 months in 1956) -- where he eventually became the first (and only, so far) person to serve in Congress after their 100th birthday. Due to his lengthy tenure in office, Thurmond was president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate for several years when his party was in control of the Senate.

As president pro tem, Thurmond was third in the Presidential line of succession, behind the Vice President and Speaker of the House. This meant that, Thurmond was third in the line of succession well after turning 98 years old. In June 2001, Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords announced that he would begin caucusing with the Democrats in the Senate, which gave the Democrats a narrow majority and control in the Senate, However, if Jeffords had not made that decision when he did, Strom Thurmond would have been president pro tempore on September 11, 2001. That means a nearly 99-year-old man would have been third in the Presidential succession at the time of the 9/11 attacks.

#History #Presidential Stats #Presidential Data #Presidents and Vice Presidents #Longest-living Presidents #Presidential Candidates #Presidential nominees #1936 Election #1948 Election #Dixiecrats #Jimmy Carter #President Carter #John Nance Garner #Vice President Garner #Alf Landon #1936 Republican Presidential nominee #1948 Democratic National Convention #Harry S. Truman #Franklin D. Roosevelt #FDR #Strom Thurmond #President pro tempore of the U.S. Senate #U.S. Senate #Presidential Line of Succession

[black-paraphernalia]

The Ballot Or The Bullet - Malcolm X

THE NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGE BUT THE STORY IS STILL THE SAME

BROTHER MALCOLM X MADE THIS SPEECH IN THE 60′S IN THE 20TH CENTURY. HERE WE ARE IN THE 21TH CENTURY AND IF YOU CLOSE YOUR EYES AND EXCHANGE SOME NAMES, YOU WOULD KNOW THIS SPEECH IS FRESH TODAY - BOTH SIDES DIFFERENT NAME BUT ARE STILL THE SAME.

DIXIECRATS - DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THEM? 

Dixiecrats and the “Southern Strategy” was born. At the 1948 Democratic National Convention, a group led by Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota proposed some controversial new civil rights planks of racial integration and the reversal of Jim Crow laws to be included in the party platform.

Southern Democrats were dismayed. President Harry S. Truman was caught in the middle for his recent executive order to racially integrate the armed forces. As a compromise, he proposed the adoption of only those planks that had been in the 1944 platform. 

That was not enough for the liberals. Truman's own civil rights initiatives had made the civil rights debate unavoidable. The planks were adopted and 35 southern Democrats walked out in protest. They formed the States' Rights Democratic Party, which became popularly known as the Dixiecrats.

Their campaign slogan was “Segregation Forever!” Their platform also included “states’ rights” to freedom from governmental interference in an individual's or organization's prerogative to do business with whomever they wanted.

Clearer political and ideological lines began to be drawn between the Democrat and Republican parties as moderates and liberals converted from Republican to Democrat. Conservatives in the Democratic Party began to move to the increasingly conservative Republican Party. Meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, the Dixiecrats nominated South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond as their presidential candidate. (NOTE BIDEN WAS MENTORED BY STROM THURMOND) CNN FACT CHECK  Biden on his past praise of segregationist senators - click the link to read

They remained in the Democratic fold, restive, until the candidacy of Republican conservative Barry Goldwater liberated them in 1964 by refreshing some of the Dixiecrat ideologies and therefore accelerated the transition from a solid South for the Democrats to one for the Republicans. Strom Thurmond switched to the Republican Party that year and remained there until his death in December 2003. Other presidential candidates, such as Republican Richard M. Nixon in 1968, have effectively used the Southern strategy of "states' rights" and racial inequality to garner votes from the racially conservative electorate in the southern states. Excerpt Dixiecrats  by US history.com

Letters: The old Dixiecrat racists are now the Republican obstructionists of today - click link for complete story

The party was dominated by Dixiecrats and they were the Democrats of the past. Many members of today's Democratic Party were prevented from voting. When they finally received help from the voting rights bills of the 1960s, the Dixiecrats started their move from Democrat to Republican. We now have a Republican Party that has taken on the old tried and true model of the Dixiecrats. (excerpt)

BLACK PARAPHERNALIA DISCLAIMER - PLEASE READ

#black paraphernalia #Malcom X #dixiecrats #call a spade a spade

[sjerzgirl]

Great video. Explains well the rise in expressions of racial and other hate.

#bigotry #dixiecrats #politics #Obama #racism #extremismo

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 29, 2022

Heather Cox Richardson

This week, news broke that as a guest on the right-wing Real America’s Voice media network in 2020, Republican candidate for Michigan governor Tudor Dixon said that the Democrats have planned for decades to topple the United States because they have not gotten over losing the Civil War. According to Dixon, Democrats don’t want anyone to know that white Republicans freed the slaves, and are deliberately strangling “true history.” Dixon’s was a pure white power rant, but she was amplifying a theme we hear a lot these days: that Democrats were the party of enslavement, Republicans pushed emancipation, and thus the whole idea that Republican policies today are bad for Black Americans is disinformation. In reality, the parties have switched sides since the 1850s. The shift happened in the 1960s, and it happened over the issue of race. Rather than focusing on party names, it makes more sense to follow two opposed strands of thought, equality and hierarchy, as the constants. By the 1850s it was indeed primarily Democrats who backed slavery. Elite southern enslavers gradually took over first the Democratic Party, then the southern states, and finally the U.S. government. When it looked in 1854 as if they would take over the entire nation by spreading slavery to the West—thus overwhelming the free states with new slave states—northerners organized to stand against what they called the “Slave Power.” In the mid-1850s, northerners gradually came together as a new political party. They called themselves “Republicans,” in part to recall Jefferson’s political party, which was also called the Republican party, even though Jefferson by then was claimed by the Democrats. The meaning of political names changes. The new Republican Party first stood only for opposing the Slave Power, but by 1859, Lincoln had given it a new ideology: it would stand behind ordinary Americans, rather than the wealthy enslavers, using the government to provide access to resources, rather than simply protecting the wealthy. And that would mean keeping slavery limited to the American South. Prevented from imposing their will on the U.S. majority, southern Democrats split from their northern Democratic compatriots and tried to start a new nation based on racial slavery. They launched the Civil War. At first, most Republicans didn’t care much about enslaved Americans, but by 1863 the war had made them come around to the idea that the freedom of Black Americans was crucial to the success of the United States. At Gettysburg in 1863, Lincoln reinforced the principles of the Declaration of Independence and dedicated the nation to a “new birth of freedom.” In 1865 the Republican Congress passed and sent off to the states for ratification the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ending enslavement except as punishment for crime (we really need to fix that, by the way). After the war, as southern Democrats organized to reinstate white supremacy in their states, Republicans in 1868 added the Fourteenth Amendment, giving the federal government power to guarantee that states could not deny equal rights to American citizens, and then in 1870 the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing Black men the right to vote. They also established the Department of Justice to defend those rights. But by 1871, white Republicans were backing away from federal protection of Black Americans. Democrats continued to push white supremacy until 1879, when former Confederates took over Congress and threatened to destroy the government unless the federal government got out of southern affairs altogether (it’s a myth that the army left the South in 1877). Voters turned so vehemently against the former Confederates trying to impose their will on the nation’s majority that national Democrats began to shift away from their southern base, which dominated the southern states. In 1884 they ran New Yorker Grover Cleveland for office and won. For the next fifty years, both national parties would waffle on race, trying mostly to ignore it. But World War II changed the equation. Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt had begun to offer some economic protections to Black Americans with the 1930s New Deal, but Black soldiers coming home from the war demanded true equality. The blinding of Black veteran Isaac Woodard in 1946 by South Carolina law enforcement officers woke Democratic president Harry S. Truman up to the need for equal protection of the laws. Unable to get civil rights laws through Congress, Truman worked to desegregate federal contracting and military installations. Immediately, racist southern Democrats, led by South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, broke away from their own president to form their own short-lived “Dixiecrat” party backing racial segregation. Then, in 1954, Republican Dwight Eisenhower put Earl Warren, the former Republican governor of California, at the head of the Supreme Court. It promptly used the Fourteenth Amendment to declare the segregation of public schools unconstitutional in the Brown v. Board of Education decision. It seemed both parties had come around to supporting racial equality. But white supremacists in the South responded to desegregation by attacking their Black neighbors. So in 1957, with a bipartisan vote, Congress passed a civil rights act to protect Black voting. Thurmond launched the longest filibuster in U.S. history to try to stop it. Republicans who hated the government’s postwar regulation of business saw an opening to get the Dixiecrat contingent on their side. In 1960, The Conscience of a Conservative, published under the name of Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, called for getting rid of the business regulation and social safety laws passed since 1933, and claimed that the Supreme Court’s protection of civil rights was unconstitutional. When Democrat John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, he gave a rousing inaugural address promising to bring freedom to the world but, afraid of alienating southern Democrats, didn’t mention race at home. World War II veteran James Meredith promptly decided to test just how committed to human rights Kennedy actually was. Meredith sued for admission to the University of Mississippi, and when the courts ruled the state had to admit him in 1962, Kennedy had to choose between the northern wing of his party that supported civil rights, and the southern racists. Pushed by his brother and attorney general Robert, Kennedy backed Meredith’s registration with federal troops. Republicans already mad at business regulation now worked to pick up the white supremacists who had backed the Dixiecrats and who, by 1964, were attacking Black Americans and their white allies as they tried to enroll Black voters. In 1964, Republicans ran Goldwater for president on a platform calling for slashing federal power and empowering the states to run their affairs as they wished. Goldwater lost the election, but Strom Thurmond publicly switched parties, and Republicans picked up the five states of the Deep South (as well as Arizona) for the first time since Reconstruction. Democrats, meanwhile, went all in on racial equality. Kennedy had come around to calling for civil rights legislation, and after his assassination, his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, pushed hard first for the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which Congress passed while FBI agents were searching for three murdered civil rights workers in Mississippi—and then, after law enforcement officers in Selma, Alabama, attacked voting rights advocates as they crossed a bridge named for a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Democrats had become the party of equality. But the votes for the civil rights laws had been bipartisan, and it was not at all clear that the Republicans wouldn’t also back civil rights. After all, Goldwater had gotten shellacked when he made common cause with white supremacists. But in 1968, Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon knew he had a hard fight ahead of him. He figured he needed to pick up the old Dixiecrats, who were now politically homeless. He went to Thurmond with a quiet promise not to use the federal government to protect Black rights in the South in exchange for his support. This “Southern strategy” worked. Thurmond publicly backed Nixon. From then on, white supremacists made up a key part of the Republicans’ base, and the party increasingly pushed on old racial themes—Ronald Reagan’s welfare queen, for example, or George H.W. Bush’s “Willie Horton” ad, or the trope of “makers” and “takers”—to keep them on board. The parties had switched positions over equality and hierarchy. Since 1964, Republicans have always won the majority of the nation’s white vote, while Democrats rely on Black voters, especially Black women. And that is the actual true history of how it happened that a Republican candidate for office, representing a party that once defended civil rights, made white power rants on public media.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #slavery #racism #Civil War #history #political history #Republican Party #Democratic Party #Dixiecrats #US History

[thenewdemocratus]

Video Activist The Best Man From (1964) Some Things Never Change

Source:The Daily Press I saw The Best Man the 1964 version for the first time in late 2008, during that presidential election between Barack Obama and John McCain on Turner Classic Movies which was doing a special where they showed political movies all night one night a week in October. The Best Man is about essentially a divided party and they aren’t sure who they should nominate for…

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#1964 #America #California #Center Left #Christian Nationalism #Christian Nationalists #Cliff Robertson #Democratic Party #Dixiecrats #Far Right #Henry Fonda #Hollywood #Los Angeles #Nationalism #Nationalists #NeoConfederacy #NeoConfederates #New Right #Political Conventions #Populism #Populists #Progresisves #Progressive Democrats #Progressivism #Southern Democrats #Tea Party #The 1960s #The Best Man 1964 #The Best Man 1964 Movie #United States

[lngcoalh61bz]

Corrida eyaculacion mecos Beau cul d Irak Mutti wird gefickt und fotagrafiert Tighty ladyboy shemale swallowed a strangers big cock Mi mama y yo cuando mis hermanos se van Twinks big balls swinging while spitroasted by friends Sexy Shemale Eating Her Partner Ass On Cam Reverse Cowgirl with a PAWG til she cums girls partying after hours licking pussy and clits while Ass Gape by Monster Black Dildo

#Dixiecratic #homoeophyllous #nonlabelling #enwomb #mothproofed #hyponastically #vegetationally #neurodendrite #shackled #Mendelism #txt #Puinavi #augh #hemicataleptic #four-cylinder #remask #Ahantchuyuk #furphy #pastorling #subindication

[lewbornmann]

The Challenge To Democracy

The Challenge To Democracy

It seems to me…. “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”  ~ Frederick Douglass[1]. Politics should never be divorced from conscience.  When any element of our nation demands acceptance of its goals while failing to recognize any contrary opinion, it is deserving of rejection.  Resolution of differences in a peaceful and democratic manner is the foundation of our nation where minority…

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#2020 Election #6 January 2020 #Abraham Lincoln #beliefs #Biden #Big Lie #Christian #Christians #civility #conflict #Conservative #conservatives #Constitution #democracy #disinformation #Dixiecrats #Donald Trump #election #election results #elections #Evangelical Christians #Extremist #extremists #Faustian bargain #filibuster #government #hypocrite #ideology #incivility #Jean-Jacques Rousseau

[qupritsuvwix]

Hairy bird?

#harry f byrd #the byrd organization #white supremism #dixiecrats

[inthedayswhenlandswerefew]

1968 [Chapter 6: Athena, Goddess Of Wisdom]

Series Summary: Aemond is embroiled in a fierce battle to secure the Democratic Party nomination and defeat his archnemesis, Richard Nixon, in the presidential election. You are his wife of two years and wholeheartedly indoctrinated into the Targaryen political dynasty. But you have an archnemesis of your own: Aemond’s chronically delinquent brother Aegon.

Series Warnings: Language, sexual content (18+ readers only), violence, bodily injury, character deaths, New Jersey, age-gap relationships, drinking, smoking, drugs, pregnancy and childbirth, kids with weird Greek names, historical topics including war and discrimination, math.

Word Count: 5.2k

Let me know if you’d like to be tagged! 🥰

💜 All of my writing can be found HERE! 💜

Here at the midway point in our journey—like Dante stumbling upon the gates of the Inferno—would it be the right moment to review what’s at stake? Let’s begin.

It’s the end of August. The delegates of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago officially vote to name Aemond the party’s presidential candidate. His ascension is aided by 10,000 antiwar demonstrators who flood into the city and threaten to set it ablaze if Hubert Humphrey is chosen instead. At the end—in his death rattle—Humphrey begs to be Aemond’s running mate, one last humiliation he cannot resist. Humphrey is denied. Eugene McCarthy, dignity intact, boards a commercial flight to his home state of Minnesota without looking back.

Aemond selects U.S. Ambassador to France, Sargent Shriver, to be his vice president. Shriver is a Kennedy by marriage—his wife, JFK’s younger sister Eunice, just founded the Special Olympics—and has previously headed the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Peace Corps, and the Chicago Board of Education. He also served as the architect of the president’s “War on Poverty” before distancing himself from the imploding Johnson administration. Shriver is not a concession to fence-sitting moderates or Southern Dixiecrats, but an embodiment of Aemond’s commitment to unapologetic progressivism. Richard Nixon spends the weekend campaigning in his native California, a gold vein of votes like the mines settlers rushed to in 1848. George Wallace announces that he will run as an Independent. Racists everywhere rejoice.

Phase III of the Tet Offensive is underway in Vietnam; 700 American soldiers have been killed this month alone. Riots break out in military prisons where the U.S. Army is keeping their deserters. The North Vietnamese refuse to allow Pope Paul VI to visit Hanoi on a peace mission. President Johnson calls both Aemond and Nixon to personally inform them of this latest evidence of the communists’ unwillingness to negotiate in good faith. Daeron and John McCain remain in Hỏa Lò Prison. The draft swallows men like the titan Cronus devoured his own children.

In Eastern Europe, the Russians are crushing pro-democracy protests in the largest military operation since World War II as half a million troops roll into Czechoslovakia. In Caswell County, North Carolina, the last remaining segregated school district in the nation is ordered by a federal judge to integrate after years of stalling. On the Fangataufa Atoll in the South Pacific, France becomes the fifth nation to successfully explode a hydrogen bomb. In Mexico City, 300,000 students gather to protest the authoritarian regime of President Diaz Ordaz. In Guatemala, American ambassador John Gordon Mein is murdered by a Marxist guerilla organization called the Rebel Armed Forces. In Columbus, Ohio, nine guards are held hostage during a prison riot; after 30 hours, they’re rescued by a SWAT team.

The latest issue of Life magazine brings worldwide attention to catastrophic industrial pollution in the Great Lakes. The first successful multiorgan transplant is carried out at Houston Methodist Hospital. The Beatles release Hey Jude, the best-selling single of 1968 in the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Canada. NASA’s Apollo lunar landing program plans to launch a crewed shuttle next year, just in time to fulfill John F. Kennedy’s 1962 promise to put a man on the moon “before the end of the decade.” If this is successful, the United States will win the Space Race and prove the superiority of capitalism. If it fails, the martyred astronauts will join all the other ghosts of this apocalyptic age, an epoch born under bad stars.

The night sky glows with the ancient debris of the Aurigid meteor shower. From down here on Earth, Jupiter is a radiant white gleam, visible with the naked eye and admired since humans were making cave paintings and Stonehenge. But Io is a mystery. With a telescope, she becomes a dust mote entrapped by Jupiter’s gravity; to the casual observer, she doesn’t exist at all.

~~~~~~~~~~

What was it like, that very first time? It’s strange to remember. You’re both different people now.

It’s May, 1966. You and Aemond are engaged, due to be married in three short weeks, and if you get pregnant then it’s no harm, no foul. In reality, it will end up taking you over a year to conceive, but no one knows that yet; you are living in the liminal space between what you imagine your life will be and the cold blade of the truth. Aemond has brought you to Asteria for the weekend, an increasingly common occurrence. The Targaryens—minus one, that holdout prodigal son, always glowering from behind swigs of rum and clouds of smoke—have already begun to treat you like a member of the family. The flock of Alopekis yap excitedly and lick your shins. Eudoxia learns your favorite snacks so she can have them ready when you arrive.

One night Aemond takes your hand and leads you to Helaena’s garden, darkness turned to twilight in the artificial luminance of the main house. You can hear distant voices, chatter and laughter, and the Beatles’ Rubber Soul spinning on the record player in the living room like a black hole, gravity that not even light can escape when it is wrenched over the event horizon.

You’re giggling as Aemond pulls you along, faster and faster, weaving through pathways lined with roses and sunflowers and butterfly bushes. Your high heels sink into soft, fertile earth; the air in your lungs is cool and infinite. “Where are we going?”

And Aemond grins back at you as he replies: “To Olympus.”

In the circle of hedges guarded by thirteen gods of stone, Aemond unzips your modest pink sundress and slips your heels off your feet, kneeling like he’s proposing to you again. When you are bare and secretless, he draws you down onto the grass and opens you, claims you, fills you to the brim as the crystalline water of the fountain patters and Zeus hurls his lightning bolts, an eternal storm, unending war. It’s intense in a way it never was with your first boyfriend, a sweet polite boy who talked about feminist theory and followed his enlightened conscience all the way to Vietnam. This isn’t just a pleasant way to pass a Friday night, something to look forward to between differential equations textbooks and calculus proofs. With Aemond it’s a ritual; it’s something so overpowering it almost scares you.

“Aphrodite,” Aemond murmurs against your throat, and when you try to get on top he stops you, pins you to the ground, thrusts hard and deep, and you try not to moan too loudly as you surrender, his weight on you like a prophesy. This is how he wants you. This is where you belong.

Has someone ever stitched you to their side, pushing the needle through your skin again and again as the fabric latticework takes shape, until their blood spills into your veins and your antibodies can no longer tell the difference? He makes you think you’ve forgotten who you were before. He makes you want to believe in things the world taught you were myths.

But that was over two years ago. Now Aemond is not your spellbinding almost-stranger of a fiancé—shrouded in just the right amount of mystery—but your husband, the father of your dead child, the presidential candidate. You miss when he was a mirage. You miss what it felt like to get high on the idea of him, each taste a hit, each touch a rush of toxins to the bloodstream.

Seven weeks after your emergency c-section, you are healing. Your belly no longer aches, your bleeding stops, you can rejoin the living in this last gasp of summer. Ludwika takes you shopping and you pick out new swimsuits; you’ve gone up a size since the baby, and it shows no signs of vanishing. In the fitting room, Ludwika chain-smokes Camel cigarettes and claps when you show her each outfit, ordering you to spin around, telling you that there’s nothing like Oleg Cassini back in Poland. You plan to buy three swimsuits. Ludwika insists you get five. She pays with Otto’s American Express.

That afternoon at home in your blue bedroom, you get changed to join the rest of the family down by the pool, your first swim since Ari was born. You choose Ludwika’s favorite: a dreamy turquoise two-piece with flowing transparent fabric that drapes your midsection. You can still see the dark vertical line of where the doctors stitched you closed. Now you and Aemond match; he got his scar on the floor of the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, you earned yours at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. There are gold chains on your wrist and looped around your neck. Warm sunlight and ocean wind pours in through the open windows.

Aemond appears in the doorway and you turn to show him, proud of how you’ve pulled yourself together, how this past year hasn’t put you in an asylum. His right eye catches on your scar and stays there for a long time. Then at last he says: “You don’t have something else to wear?”

~~~~~~~~~~

It’s Labor Day, and Asteria has been descended upon by guests invited to celebrate Aemond’s nomination. The dining room table is overflowing with champagne, Agiorgitiko wine, platters of mini spanakopitas, lamb gyros, pita bread with hummus and tzatziki, feta cheese and cured meats, grilled octopus, baklava, and kourabiethes. Eudoxia is rushing around sweeping up crumbs and shooing tipsy visitors away from antique vases shipped here from Greece. Aemond’s celebrity endorsers include Sammy Davis Jr., Sonny and Cher, Andy Williams, Bobby Darin, Warren Beatty, Shirley MacLaine, Claudine Longet, and a number of politicians; but the most notable attendee is President Lyndon Baines Johnson, shadowed by Secret Service agents. He won’t be making any surprise appearances on the campaign trail for Aemond—in the present political climate, he would be more of a liability than an asset—but he has travelled to Long Beach Island tonight to offer his well-wishes. From the record player thrums Jimi Hendrix’s All Along The Watchtower.

When you finish getting ready and arrive downstairs, you spot Aegon: slouching in a velvet chair over a century old, hair shagging in his eyes, sipping something out of a chipped mug he clasps with both hands, flirting with a bubbly early-twenties campaign staffer. Aegon smiles and waves when he sees you. You wave back. And you think: When did he become the person I look for when I walk into a room?

Now Aemond is beside you in a blue suit—beaming, confident, his glass eye in place, a hand resting on your waist—and Aegon isn’t smiling anymore. He takes a gulp of what is almost certainly straight rum from his mug and returns his attention to the campaign staffer, his lady of the hour. You picture him undressing her on his shag carpet and feel disorienting, violent envy like a bullet.

Viserys is already fast asleep upstairs, but the rest of the family is out en masse to charm the invitees and pose for photographs. Alicent, Helaena, and Mimi—trying very hard to act sober, blinking too often—are chit-chatting with the other political wives. Otto is complaining about something to Criston; Criston is pretending to listen as he stares at Alicent. Ludwika is smoking her Camels and talking to several young journalists who are ogling her, enraptured. Fosco and Sargent Shriver are entertaining a group of guests with a boisterous, lighthearted debate on the merits of Italian versus French cuisine, though they agree that both are superior to Greek. The nannies have brought the eight children to be paraded around before bedtime. All Cosmo wants to do is clutch your hand and “help” you navigate around the living room, warning you not to step on the small, weaving Alopekis. When Mimi attempts to steal her youngest son away, he ignores her, and as she begins to make a scene you rebuke her with a harsh glare. Mimi retreats meekly. She has never argued with you, not once in over two years. You speak for Aemond, and Aemond is a god.

As the children are herded off to their beds by the nannies, Bobby Kennedy—presently serving as a New York senator despite residing primarily on his family’s compound in Massachusetts—approaches to congratulate Aemond. His wife Ethel is a tiny, nasally, scrappy but not terribly bright woman, five months pregnant with her eleventh child, and you have to get away from her like a hand pulled from a hot stove.

“You know, I was considering running,” Bobby says to Aemond, chuckling, good-natured. “But when I saw you get in the race, I thought better of it! Maybe I’ll give it a go in ’76, huh?”

“Hey, kid, what a tough year you’ve had,” Ethel tells you, patting your forearm. You can’t tear your eyes from her small belly. She has ten living children already. I couldn’t keep one. What kind of sense does that make? “We’re real sorry for your trouble, aren’t we, Bobby?”

Now he is nodding somberly. “We are. We sure are. We’ve been praying for you both.”

Aemond is thanking them, sounding touched but entirely collected. You manage some hurried response and then excuse yourself. Your hands are shaking as you cross the room, not really seeing it. You walk right into Lady Bird Johnson. She takes pity on you; she seems to perceive how rattled you are. “Oh Lyndon, look, it’s just who we were hoping to speak to! The next first lady of the United States. And how beautiful you are, just radiant. How do you keep your hair so perfect? That glamorous updo. You never have a single strand out of place.” Lady Bird lays a palm tenderly on your bare shoulder. She has an unusual, angular face, but a wise sort of compassion that only comes from suffering. Her husband is an unrepentant serial cheater. “I’ll make you a list of everything you need to know about the White House. All the quirks of the property, and the hidden gems too!”

“You’re so kind. We’ll see what happens in November…”

“Good evening, ma’am,” President Johnson says, smiling warmly. He’s an ugly man, but there’s something hypnotic that lives inside him and shines through his eyes like the blaze of a lighthouse. He pulls you in through the dark, through the storm; he promises you answers to questions you haven’t thought of yet. LBJ is 6’4 and known for bullying his political adversaries with the so-called “Johnson Treatment”; he leans in and makes rapid-fire demands until they forget he’s not allowed to hit them. “I have to tell you frankly, I don’t envy anyone who inherits that den of rattlesnakes in Washington D.C.”

“Lyndon, don’t frighten her,” Lady Bird scolds fondly.

“Everyone thinks they know what to do about Vietnam,” LBJ plods onwards. “But it’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t clusterfuck. If you keep fighting, they call you a murderer. But if you pull the troops out and South Vietnam falls to the communists, every single man lost was for nothing, and you think the families will stand for that? Their kid in a body bag, or his legs blown off, or his brain scrambled? There’s no easy answer. It’s a goddamn bitch of a quagmire.”

Lady Bird offers you a sympathetic smirk. Sorry about all this unpleasantness, she means. When he gets himself worked up, I can’t stop him. But you find yourself feeling sorry for President Johnson. It will be difficult for him to learn how to fade into disgraced obscurity after once being so omnipotent, so beloved. Reinvention hurts like hell: fevers raging, bones mending, healing flesh that itches so ferociously you want to claw it off.

LBJ gives Lady Bird a look, quick but meaningful. She acquiesces. This has happened a thousand times before. “It was so nice talking to you, dear,” she tells you, then crosses the living room to pay her respects to Alicent.

The president steps closer, looming, towering. The Johnson Treatment?? you think, but no; he isn’t trying to intimidate you. He’s just curious.

“Do you know what Aemond’s plan is for ‘Nam?” LBJ asks, eyes urgent, voice low. “I’m sure he has one. He’s sworn to end the draft as soon as he gets into office, but how is he going to make sure the South Vietnamese can fend off the North themselves? We’re trying to train the bastards, but if we left they’d fold in months. It would be the first war the U.S. ever lost. Does he understand that?”

“He doesn’t really discuss it with me.” That’s true; you know his policies, but only because they are a constant subject of conversation within the family, something you all breathe like oxygen.

“We can’t let Nixon win,” LBJ continues. “It’s mass suicide to leave the country in his hands. The man can’t hold his liquor anymore, getting robbed by Kennedy in ’60 broke something in him. He gets sloshed and shoves his aids around, makes up conspiracies in his head. He’s a paranoid little prick. He’ll surveille the American people. He’ll launch a nuke at Moscow.”

You honestly don’t know what he expects you to say. “I’ll pass the message along to Aemond.”

“People love you, Mrs. Targaryen.” LBJ watching you closely. “Believe it or not, they used to love me too. But I still remember how to play the game. You’re the only reason Aemond is leading the polls in Florida. You can get him other states too. Jack needed Jackie. Aemond needs you. And you’ve had tragedies, and that’s a damn shame. But don’t you miss an opportunity. You take every disappointment, every fucked up cruelty of life and find a way to make it work for you. You pin it to your chest like a goddamn medal. Every single scar makes you look more mortal to those people going to the ballot box in November. You want them to be able to see themselves in you. It helps the mansions and the millions go down smoother.”

“President Johnson!” Aegon says as he saunters over, huge mocking grin. He thumps a closed fist against the Texan’s broad chest; the Secret Service agents standing ten feet away observe this sternly. “How thoughtful of you to be here, taking time out of your busy schedule, squeezing us in between war crimes.”

“The mayor of Trenton,” LBJ jabs.

“The butcher of Saigon.”

Now the president is no longer amused. “You’ve never accomplished anything in your whole damn life, son. Your obituary will be the size of a postage stamp. I’m looking forward to reading it someday soon.” He leaves, rejoining Lady Bird at the opposite end of the room.

You frown at Aegon, disapproving. You’re dressed in a sparkling, royal blue gown that Aemond chose. “That was unnecessary.”

Aegon is wearing an ill-fitting green shirt—half the buttons undone—khaki pants, and tan moccasins. “I just did you a favor.”

“What happened to your new girlfriend? Shouldn’t she be getting railed in your basement right now? Did she have a prior commitment? Did she have a spelling test to study for? Those can be tricky, such complex words. Juvenile. Inappropriate. Infidelity.”

“You know what he brags about?” Aegon says, meaning LBJ. “That he’s fucked more women by accident than John F. Kennedy ever did on purpose.”

“That sounds…logistically challenging.”

“He’s a lech. He’s a freak. He tells everyone on Capitol Hill how big his cock is. He takes it out and swings it around during meetings.”

“And that’s all far less than admirable, but he’s not going to do something like that around me.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he’s not an idiot,” you say impatiently. “He was perfectly civil. And I was getting interesting advice.”

Aegon rolls his eyes, exasperated. “Yeah, okay, I’m sorry I crashed your cute little pep talk with Lyndon Johnson, the most hated man on the planet.”

“I guess you can’t stop Aemond from touching me, so you have to terrorize LBJ instead.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Aegon hisses, and his venom stuns you. And now you’re both trapped: you loosed the arrow, he proved you hit the mark. He’s flushing a deep, mortified red. Your guts are twisting with remorse.

“Aegon, wait, I didn’t mean—”

He whirls and storms off, shoving his way through the crowd. People glare at him as they clutch their glasses and plates, sighing in that What else do you expect from the worthless son? sort of way. You’re still gaping blankly at the place where Aegon stood when Aemond finds you, snakes a hand around the back of your neck, and whispers through the painstakingly-arranged wisps of hair that fall around your ear: “Follow me.”

It’s not a question. It’s a command. You trail him through the living room, into the foyer, and through the front door, not knowing what he wants. Outside the moon is a sliver; the light from the main house makes the stars hard to see. “Aemond, you’ll never believe the conversation I just had with LBJ. He really unloaded, I think the stress is driving him insane. I have to tell you what he said about—”

“Later.” And this is jarring; Aemond doesn’t put anything before strategy. He grabs your hand as he turns into Helaena’s garden, and only then do you understand what he wants. Instinctively, your legs lock up and your feet stop moving. Aemond tugs you onward. He wants it to be like the very first time. He intends to start over with you, the dawning of a new age in the dead of night.

Hidden in the circle of hedges, he takes your face roughly in his hands and kisses you, drinks you down like a vampire, consumes you like wildfire. But your skull echoes with panic. I don’t want him touching me. I don’t want another child with him. “Aemond…”

He doesn’t hear you, or acts like he doesn’t, or mistakes it for a murmur of desire, or chooses to believe it is. He has you down on the grass under the vengeful gaze of Zeus, the fountain splashing, the sounds of the house a low foreign drone. He yanks off your panties, but he doesn’t want you naked like he always did before. He pushes the hem of your shimmering cobalt gown up to your hips and unbuckles his trousers. And you realize as he’s touching you, as he’s easing himself into you: He doesn’t want to have to look at my scar.

You can’t ignore him, you can’t pretend it’s not happening. He’s too big for that. It’s a biting fullness that demands to be felt. So you kiss him back, and knot your fingers in his short hair like you used to, and try to remember the things you always said to him before. And when Aemond is too absorbed to notice, you look away from him, from the statue of Zeus, and peer up into the stone face of Athena instead: the goddess who never married and who knows the answer to every question.

“I love you,” Aemond says when it’s over, marveling at the slopes of your face in the dim ethereal light. “Everything will be right again soon. Everything will be perfect.”

You conjure up a smile and nod like you believe him.

“What did LBJ say?”

“Can I tell you later tonight? After the party, maybe? I just need a few minutes.”

“Of course.” And now Aemond pretends to be patient. He buckles his belt and returns to the main house, his blood coursing with the possibilities only you can make real, his skin damp with your sweat.

For a while—ten minutes, twenty minutes—you lie there on the cool grass wondering what it was like for all those mortals and nymphs, being pinned down by Zeus and then having Hera try to kill them afterwards, raising ill-fated reviled bastards they couldn’t help but love. What is heaven if the realm of the immortals is so cruel? Why does the god of justice seem so immune to it?

When at last you rise and walk back towards the house, you find Mimi at the edge of the garden. She’s on her knees and retching into a rose bush; she’s cut her face on the thorns, but she hasn’t noticed yet. She’s groaning; she seems lost.

You reach for her, gripping her bony shoulders. “Mimi, here, let’s get you upstairs…”

“No,” she blubbers, tears streaming down her scratched cheeks. “Just go away. Leave me.”

“Mimi—”

“No!” she roars, a mournful hemorrhage as she slaps your hands until you release her.

“You don’t have to be this way,” you tell her, distraught. “You can give up drinking. We’ll help you, me and Fosco and Ludwika. You can start over. You can be healthy and present again, you can live a real life.”

Mimi stares up at you, her grey eyes glassy and bloodshot but with a vicious, piercing honesty. “My husband hates me. My kids don’t know I exist. What the hell do I have to be sober for?”

You weren’t expecting this. You don’t know what to say. “We can help make the world better.”

“The world would be better without me in it.”

Then Mimi curls up on the grass under the rose bush, and stays there until you return with Fosco to drag her upstairs to her empty bed.

~~~~~~~~~~

The next afternoon, you’re lying on a lounge chair by the pool. Tomorrow the family will leave Asteria and embark upon a vigorous campaign schedule that will continue, with very few breaks, until Election Day on Tuesday, November 5th. The children are splashing and shrieking in the pool with Fosco, but you aren’t looking at them. You’re staring across the sun-drenched emerald lawn at the Atlantic Ocean. You’re envisioning all the bones and splinters of sunken ships that must litter the silt of the abyss; you’re thinking that it’s a graveyard with no headstones, no memory. Your swimsuit is a red one-piece. Your eyes are shielded by large black Ray Bans aviator sunglasses. Your gaze flicks up to the cloudless blue sky, where all the stars and planets are invisible.

Jupiter has nearly a hundred moons; the largest four were discovered by Galileo in 1610. Europa is a smooth white cosmic marble with a crust of ice, beautiful, immaculate. Ganymede, the largest moon in our solar system and the only satellite with its own magnetic field, is rumored to have a vast underground saltwater ocean that may contain life. Callisto is dark and indomitable, riddled with impact craters; because of her dynamic atmosphere and location beyond Jupiter’s radiation belts, she is considered the best location for possible future crewed missions to the Jovian system. But Io is a wasteland. She has no water and no oxygen. Her only children are 400 active volcanoes, sulfur plumes and lava flows, mountains of silicate rock higher than Mount Everest, cataclysmic earthquakes as her crust slips around on a mantle of magma. Her daily radiation levels are 36 times the lethal limit for humans. If Hades had a home in our corner of the galaxy, it would be Io. She glows ruby and gold with barren apocalyptic fury. You can feel yourself turning poisonous like she is. You can feel your skin splitting open as the lava spills out.

Aegon trots out of the house—red swim trunks, cheap red plastic sunglasses, no shirt, a beach towel slung around his neck, flip flops—and kicks your chair. “Get up. We’re going sailing.”

“I don’t want to talk to anybody.”

“Great, because I’m not asking you to talk. I’m telling you to get in my boat.”

You don’t reply. You don’t think you can without your voice cracking. Aegon crouches down beside your chair and pushes your sunglasses up into your Brigitte Bardot-inspired hair so he can see your face. Your eyes are pink, wet, desperately sad. Deep troubled grooves appear in his forehead as he studies you. Gently, wordlessly, he pats your cheek twice and lowers your sunglasses back over your eyes. Then he stands up again and offers you his hand.

“Let’s go,” Aegon says, softly this time. You take his hand and follow him down to the boathouse.

Five vessels are currently kept there. Aegon’s sailboat is a 25-foot Wianno Senior sloop, just roomy enough for a few passengers. He’s had it since long before you married into the Targaryen family. It is white with hand-painted gold accents; the name Sunfyre adorns the stern. He unmoors the boat, pushes it out into the open water, and raises the sails.

You glide eastbound over the glittering crests of waves, slowly at first, then faster as the sails catch the wind. Aegon has one hand on the rudder, the other grasping the ropes. And the farther you get from shore, the smaller Asteria seems, and the Targaryen family, and the presidential election, and the United States itself. Now all that exists is this boat: you, Aegon, the squawking gulls, the school of mackerel, the ocean. The sun beats down; the breeze rips strands of your hair free. The battery-powered record player is blasting White Room by Cream. When you are far enough from land that no journalists would be able to get a photo, Aegon takes two joints and his Zippo out of the pocket of his swim trunks. He puts both joints between his lips, lights them, and passes you one. Then he stretches out beside you on the deck, gazing up at the September sky.

You ask as your muscles unravel and your thoughts turn light and easy to share: “Why did you bring me out here?”

“So you can drown yourself,” Aegon says, and you both laugh. “Nah. I used to go sailing all the time when I was a teenager. It always made me feel better. It was the only place where I could really be alone.”

You consider the math. “Wow. You haven’t been a teenager since before I was in kindergarten.”

“It’s weird to think about. You don’t seem that young.”

“Thanks, I guess. You don’t seem that old.”

“Maybe we’re meeting in the middle.” He inhales deeply and then exhales in a rush of smoke. “What do you think, should I get an earring?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“It might shock Otto so bad it kills him.”

“I’ll get two.” And then Aegon says: “It’s not cool for you to mock me.”

You are dismayed; you didn’t mean to hurt him. “I wasn’t.”

“Yes, you were. You were mocking me. You mocked me about the receipt under my ashtray, and then you mocked me again last night. I’m up for a lot of things, but I can’t handle that. Okay?”

“Okay.” You turn your head so you can see him: shaggy blonde hair, stubble, perpetual sunburn, the softness of his belly and his chest, flesh you long to vanish into like rain through parched earth. “Aegon?”

He looks over at you. “Io?”

“I don’t want Aemond to touch me either.”

He’s surprised; not by what you feel, but because you’ve said it aloud, a treason like Prometheus giving mankind the gift of fire. “What are we gonna do about it?”

If you were the goddess of wisdom, maybe you’d know.

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[socialjusticeinamerica]

They don’t even know of a time when life was better in America. Actually Gen X was the first generation in America not to do better than their parents. The same being true for the last few years of the Boomer generation. Y also is struggling.

The lady Boomers and X’ers remember what it was like before Reagan took over and busted unions in 1980. Wages dropped, factory owners took their shops to the Deep South where unions had long since been busted or never allowed to set up in the first place. Then the oligarchs outsourced their work and shuttered factories nationwide.

Before Reagan one parent working 40 hrs a week at a union job could afford a mortgage, a new car, medical insurance, and college for their 2.5 kids. That also applied to “minorities” or marginalized people who benefitted from union protections and negotiated standard pay scales.

With Reagan a home went from two years salary to 10+ years salary. Tuition did the same. Cars that cost a month’s salary soared to a year’s salary. Wages have remained stagnant for about 40 years. The wealthy paid high taxes and we had everything. Now the remnants of the middle class pay the bulk of taxes while multimillionaires and billionaires pay little or even nothing. Credit card interest soared to over 20% in some cases while Republikkkans passed laws making it easier for those card companies to sue you whilst making it nearly impossible for you to sue them. Mentally disabled people were literally dumped into the streets causing widespread homeless which is criminalized in affluent areas and red states. Guns and drugs flooded the streets. Bigoted white nationalists became radicalized when Reagan granted Australian Rupert Murdoch citizenship so he could open Fox News and then shut down the Fairness Doctrine so propaganda could be spread under the guise of news.

All the societal problems we suffer today began with the birth of the modern RepubliKKKan party led by their racist Dotard Ronald Reagan in 1980. The GOP became an organized crime syndicate and the government became a tool for the rich. The middle class shrunk from a sizeable percentage of the population to a handful of areas in the north and along the west coast. Many foolish people believe themselves to be in the middle class but in fact they are just perpetual debtors.

If you’re young your first reaction might be to blame the Boomers because that’s incorrectly become a marketed belief. The Boomer generation fought against the GOP and its wars, racism, pollution, big oil, corporate welfare, and black hole military industrial complex. They were the hippies and political activists that marched on Washington and other places. They booted the racist Dixiecrats (southern conservative racist Dems) from the Democratic Party while shifting educated liberals left. Sadly the GOP under Nixon and his colleagues welcomed the racists and conservative nut jobs. Don’t fight a generational war when you should be fighting a class/culture/political war.

The younger generation needs to educate itself about the political parties and how life was better just a few decades back and begin to vote. Vote, then organize in the workplace through unions and in the streets to attract more young voters and to counter protest the Republikkkan right-wing oligarch take-over of America. Complaining and taking refuge in the internet won’t turn things around. Become politically active, become stoke, bring back lower tuition, affordable health care, labor unions, workers rights, voters rights, etc.