If your only source of political information is the mainstream media, you are being exposed to major gaslighting about the upcoming elections. Honestly, you have been for years. We have been subjected to the notion that there is little difference between Democrats and Republicans. The false equivalency theme pushed in the media owned by oligarchic monied interests has middle-class Americans voting on (this includes failing to make the effort to show up to vote against these policies) and acting against their own self-interests since before the Civil War. That dynamic is still a powerful force behind current-day politics.
Another powerful under current to this reality is the hold tax-exempt religious groups play in our politics. The hold that Christianity and Judaism have on our politics is devastating. These religions remain foundational to racist White Nationalism as it helps keep Black and Brown people in line to accept and be complicit with policies that are anti-diversity, anti-woman, anti-equality on social and economic levels. They use their doctrine to force minority groups to accept abusive policing and economically repressive justice systems in their communities.
Currently, the media and Republicans in Congress regularly promote the notion of a two-tier justice system weaponized and directed at Donald Trump. It is clear that he has benefitted from being a White male of the wealth class to elude accountability for a life of white-collar criminality. During the same period, hundreds of thousands of Black, Brown, and lower-income people have suffered quick and sometimes fatal consequences from law enforcement officers who are rarely held to account for the abuse and misuse of their authorities.
Sadly the most powerful gaslighting comes in the form of candidate and policy disinformation during election cycles. The 2024 Presidential election cycle has begun. The mainstream media demonstrates daily that it is not equipped or unwilling to highlight and fact-check disinformation.
Trump realized that he has severe legal exposure so he announced in December 2022 that he is a candidate for President. This move was preemptive on two fronts, first to deter serious Republican competition, and second to use the candidacy as a means to thwart prosecution, at least a trial before the election. He is afraid that if he is convicted he will not win the general election and not have the ability to pardon himself.
The other major bit of gaslighting by the media, Republicans, and some Democrats, is the issue of Joe Biden’s age. This false flag issue permeates the Presidential discussion, without regard to Biden’s legislative wins, the success of his economic policies, the success of the COVID-19 plans his Administration implemented, the plan to address the supply-chain shortages, his policies to curb the rise of gas prices for American motorists, and his efforts to make diversity a focal point in his administration.
Republicans make fun of his speech, but most informed people know Biden stuttered in his youth and still struggles with it from time to time. Many people, including the media, seem to have no problem with the word-salad nonsensical things Trump and most MAGA non-intellectuals utter daily. Biden works more hours per day than Trump did as President. Trump needs two hands to drink a glass of water. Trump needed an escort to walk down a ramp. Biden tripped over a sandbag that was onstage at a graduation. Biden is formidable with his grasp of details. I had a strong grasp of intricate and nuanced concepts during meetings. Trump holds meetings to force his cabinet members to sing his praises.
I have no problem with his age. He has been insightful and forward-thinking. I do take issue with so-called Moderate Democrats like Sinema, Manchin, and Feinstein who take money from business entities looking to block Progressive reforms to tax breaks, environmental regulations, financial industry regulations, and income equality. These folks will generate a third-party candidate to run against Trump and Biden, should they be the general election candidates.
We should remember that the Trump Administration was informed about COVID-19 in October 2019. Trump praised China’s handling of the initial outbreak. Later, Trump’s administration bungled the crisis, allowing over 1 million Americans to die. Many Republican Governors, Senators, and other officials fought the implementation of safety protocols and resisted supporting the vaccine. They resisted closing schools though they know that older Americans, especially teachers, were susceptible to contracting the virus while younger Americans, like students, were initially not widely affected until the virus mutated.
Here is the point, the next election is critical to preserving a diverse multicultural democratic nation, versus a Christian White Nationalist Dictatorship/Autocratic/Oligarchy. Democrats have to gain control of the House of Representatives, The Senate, and the Presidency. Even then Moderates who blocked the Biden agenda have to be voted out of office. Biden won’t run on this, but Democrats then have to expand the Supreme Court to 13 seats.
The Supreme Court has to be counted on to make judicial rulings that benefit the majority of citizens, not a handful of millionaires, billionaires, and corporations.
Below are links to videos and opinion pieces that support some of the points in this post. Being accurately informed is essential to sound judgment. Disinformation that you have not scrutinized with a discerning eye will make a ‘Useful Fool’ of anyone. Know the bias of your sources. My bias is clear, I am honesty, integrity, and the greater good.
…”Demand is high. So where are the third parties?
Here’s the problem: Our system of single-winner elections puts tremendous pressure on politicians and voters to consolidate around two options. If there can be only one winner, any vote for a minor party can only be a protest—but in a close election, that protest becomes a spoiler. In 2000, for example, Green Party candidate Ralph Nader drew crucial votes from Al Gore. If we want more parties, we need better, fairer voting rules—not more protest candidates.
The need for more parties has increased considerably over the last decade. In 2000, Nader could credibly argue that the Democrats and Republicans were too similar, even if they were drifting apart. Today, Democrats and Republicans have split into conflicting realities, threatening the foundation of electoral legitimacy on which our democracy depends.
Over the past three decades, Democrats and Republicans have sorted into two distinct geographical and cultural coalitions, with little shared real estate—either physical or mental. In today’s highly nationalized culture-war politics, the two parties maintain and energize their coalitions through the never-ending, fear-inducing fight for the soul of the nation. If you feel as though your country is being stolen from you, it might seem perfectly reasonable to storm the U.S. Capitol, as many did on Jan. 6, 2021. And it’s hard to maintain a democracy when two competing partisan teams see each other as threats to their fundamental values and way of life.
How do we escape this doom loop of escalating binary partisan warfare? The way out is to change our voting rules so more parties can play a productive—not destructive—role in our politics. The two-party system persists not because Americans want to maintain it, but because our antiquated system of single-winner plurality elections holds it in place—and makes it easy for the two parties to crush upstart opposition.
Simple plurality elections may have been the default choice 250 years ago, when it was the only mode of voting yet invented. But the world has changed considerably since then. Most advanced democracies use proportional representation to elect their legislatures, and allow multiple parties to form, and better represent the nation as a result.
Such a change may feel like a moonshot, but it doesn’t require a constitutional amendment. Congress could enact proportional multimember districts with ordinary legislation. American democracy is not static—we’ve made major changes in the past, and moments of crisis are also moments of imagination and transformation.
In countries with proportional multiparty systems, citizens are more engaged. They vote at higher rates. Partisans don’t hate each other so much. Legislatures are less geriatric. Citizens are happier.
And proportional multimember districts would make gerrymandering irrelevant. With single-member districts in a two-party system, line-drawers have tens of thousands of possible maps from which to draw the winningest one. But larger districts mean fewer lines. More parties mean less predictable voting. And multimember districts with proportionality mean that a party with 50.1 percent of the vote wins only half of the seats, instead of all (one) of them.
The good news is that the United States could easily move to proportional representation for the U.S. Congress. The elections clause of the Constitution (Article I, Section IV) gives Congress the power to decide how the House should be elected, a power it has used repeatedly. In 1967, Congress used it to require that states use single-member districts. This act, the Uniform Congressional District Act, was passed as a Civil Rights measure to prevent Southern states from using at-large bloc voting, a system that had historically disenfranchised Black voters.
They didn’t consider proportional representation back in 1967, as the two-party system was functioning reasonably well. After all, landmark Civil Rights legislation had just been passed, with overwhelming cross-partisan support. But in the 56 years since, the two parties have sorted into two geographically distinct coalitions, fighting over diverging visions of America’s future and rooted in disparate narratives of the past. Knife’s-edge majorities keep total control of Washington always one election away—a dynamic that has empowered extremists on the far right, who appear eager to throw everything into chaos rather than maintain a rotten status quo.
Proportional representation paves the way for new, flexible coalitions to emerge that allow for politics to realign and move forward, breaking the “doom loop” of escalating partisan fighting.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/07/no-labels-third-party-2024-presidential-campaign.html
….”The avowedly moderate advocacy group No Labels has long been a pain in the neck for the Democratic Party’s left wing, and even sometimes for its mainstream leaders. In 2021, for instance, it directed public support and behind-the-scenes fundraising assistance to the members of the House and Senate, most prominently New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who were working gleefully and successfully to kill large parts of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better proposal.
Now, though, the group has become a major irritant to the Beltway’s other professional centrists, too. It’s feuding with several Democratic members of the House’s bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, to the point that it paid to send attack texts out to voters in one member’s district. The business-friendly Third Way think tank recently hosted a meeting with White House officials and “Never Trump” Republicans whose subject was, in essence, how to manage their shared No Labels problem.
The cause of all this tension? No Labels plans to run its own presidential candidate in 2024 if it decides the major parties’ nominees are, quote, “unacceptable”—a determination that it says could apply to a rematch between Biden and Donald Trump. In this scenario, polling suggests that a third-party candidate running as a self-declared moderate would draw more votes from Biden than from his opponent. An organization which claims to promote civility in politics would have, in effect, engineered the reinstallation of the least civil president in American history. (A No Labels staffer told Politico that the organization will not run a third-party candidate if Ron DeSantis is the Republican nominee.)
Figuring out why this is happening requires going back to No Labels’ origins. The group is the brainchild of longtime Democratic fundraiser Nancy Jacobson, who got her start in politics organizing for presidential candidate Gary Hart on the Syracuse University campus in 1984; she’d go on to raise money for Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign and serve as the finance chair of the Democratic National Committee. Both Hart and Clinton were “New Democrats” associated with the Democratic Leadership Council, which prided itself on having outside-the-box ideas that existed in a space both between and beyond conservatism and liberalism. It was thus not surprising that when Jacobson launched No Labels in 2010, the group’s stated purpose was to create “a new kind of politics” on the “common ground” between the major parties.
A Reasonable Point of View 