We Hunted The Mammoth
Popular-vote-loser Donald Trump got his official briefing on Russia’s hacking of the election. In what we can only assume was an attempt to counteract Trump’s brilliant plan to flat-out lie about what was in this briefing, the US intelligence agencies released the declassified version of the report yesterday as well.
Earlier this week we saw what can happen when a bunch of pissed-off voters call their elected representatives to explain what’s pissing them off: Congressional Republicans dropped a ridiculous plan to gut the congressional ethics office.
One thing we’ve learned over the past year is that memes can actually influence politics. Alas, we learned this lesson from the rise of the meme-obsessed neo-Nazi alt-right.
In order to resist Trump, you need to be able to cut through the media clutter, seeking out information and analysis that doesn’t always make it onto cable news or the front page of the newspaper.
It’s a fitting end, I suppose, to this most terrible of years. Popular vote-loser Donald Trump woke up bright and early this morning, and decided to send off 2016 with a petulant, gloating tweet:
One of the things that makes Rebecca Solnit such a powerful and inspiring writer is her ability to talk bluntly and unflinchingly about what is wrong in the world, however grim the facts may be, without giving up on the hope that we need to hold onto if we want to make the world a better place.
The Tea Party movement, which rose up in the early years of the Obama presidency to oppose pretty much everything he stood for, was a reactionary, often-embarrassing political spectacle.
But as reactionary, often-embarrassing political spectacles go, it was a pretty effective one. Tea Partiers may have had trouble spelling their slogans correctly, but they managed to block a lot of Obama’s progressive agenda.
Right-wing radio host/sentient ball of rage Michael Savage has a dream: that one day soon (right after the inauguration, in fact) little white boys will be able to join hands with little white girls without having to worry that the mean “interloper … phony .. monster” currently living in the White House will sell them into little white slavery.
Shortly after the election, a former Congressional staffer named Emily Ellsworth took to Twitter to offer some advice to those ordinary citizens who would like to let Congress know what they are thinking between elections.
Some of her key points:
Mike Cernovich is a Trump-loving, conspiracy-slinging alt-right fellow traveler with a nasty habit of smearing people he doesn’t like as pedophiles.
Now he’s become the target of a small army of trolls who have managed to pull off the difficult feat of being even more terrible than he is.