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What I believe and where I stand [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2024-12-31

I am now on Daily Kos the least amount of time that I have been in the last nearly 20 years. I hope that changes. It's primarily because of all the attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, her campaign team, President Biden, the Democratic Party, and Democratic Party leaders from Daily Kos members. The amount of own goals here seems infinite. I am not willing to be part of a circular firing squad that attacks the only organization that can defeat Trump, Trumpism, and his Republican Party. You're targeting the wrong people and the wrong political party. I'm not going to be part of that. I hope this stops and you direct your ire and your fire at incoming vice president Donald Trump, incoming South African president Elon Musk, their acolytes and the Republican Party. If this message means my post isn't well-received here, it won't be the first of my posts in that category. I write what I write because of my core convictions. Generally speaking, these convictions are widely shared here.

I wrote elsewhere:

2024 ended badly for the United States, the world, democracy, and marginalized communities. It's been said before but never been as true as today that things will get worse before they get better. I am not going away. That's because everything I hold dear in this world and all the people who make this world a better place are at stake. I will NEVER forgive those who brought us to this point nor will I forget what they did. My values are the values that Americans have traditionally held until a group of people led mostly by white males, especially white male high school graduates, decided that they would abandon everything that made America America for power. There are good white men who might not have a traditional formal education but who I consider educated because they have chosen to pursue learning outside of formal academic institutions and are good people who opposed bigotry and believe in science. One of my favorite posters on this site (a lot of us admire him) whom I admire greatly fits in this category and I learn a lot from him. In fact, if you really actually pay attention in high school and are a good person, you likely know a lot more than many college graduates. Bigotry is dumb, wrong, and is inconsistent with known facts and truth. I believe in democracy, a free press, pluralism, equality, freedom and that everybody is equal under the law. I believe in love and truth and justice. That's what is at risk and under attack now. Being pro-democracy and standing for these values means opposing Trump and his Republican Party. I am and will forever be Never Trump. The next four years will be difficult, but I know that they will reveal what an enormous, enormous mistake it was to not elect Vice President Kamala Harris to be our next president and instead to allow the embodiment of evil, Donald Trump, back to the White House.

Donald Trump is an opponent of everything good in this world. The decision to put an undeniable opponent of democracy and Justice and truth and diversity and equality back into the White House cannot be rationally defended. It is indefensible especially given the great alternative we had. My Democratic Party is imperfect. But it is a fundamentally good party filled mostly with imperfect but good people. Attacking the Democratic Party as a whole and its leaders generally enables and empowers Donald Trump and his Republican Party.

You can worry about the relatively miniscule imperfections of the Democratic Party and our imperfect but fundamentally good leaders later. Right now, the simple fact is that the Democratic Party is the ONLY political party and organization that can defeat Trump, Trumpism, and his Republican Party. Whatever imperfections you find in the Democratic Party and our leaders are magnified 100 times in Donald Trump and his Republican Party. Donald Trump and his Republican Party are an existential threat to democracy, freedom, truth, justice, equality and pluralism.

We on the Pro-democracy side must support and strengthen the Democratic Party and fight against Trump's Republican Party with all the fervor we can muster. We must win. Everybody in our movement needs to do what they are able and if we do that, we will emerge victorious on the other side. Never forget that Donald Trump remains unpopular. His support is just bad people doing bad things. The apathy is a result of self-centered people with the memory of a goldfish. But he left with 34% of Americans approving of his job performance. It is only because he has not been in office and the selective memory of people that he won. As he inevitably manifests his evil character, he will remind people why they dislike him so much. Polls that showed him winning showed she was better liked. He had 48% of voters hate him while in office. That is an incredibly high number. This was as favorable a political environment for him as it could be. After the pandemic and pandemic driven inflation, this was an anti-incumbent election year and this played out in every developed democracy that had an election.

The Financial Times reported that every single incumbent party in every developed democracy that had an election lost voter share, on average about 20 percent. That's why we lost. Bad people got mad at the government because of the pandemic. That's the only reason he won. In a normal presidential election after his previous term and with his baggage of attempting a coup, inciting an armed insurrection, violating the Espionage Act, being convicted of 34 felonies, and the awful things he ran on, he loses to Vice President Kamala Harris. Even in this election, he could not win 50% of the vote. The fact that is Donald Trump remains unpopular. More people had a favorable view of her than him. He is the only president in the modern history of polling to have NEVER earned majority job approval. That is a fact. The fact is that he won 46.8% of the national popular vote in 2020 and 46.1% of the national popular vote in 2016. He had consistently lower job approval than any other president. There are more of us in the Pro-democracy movement than Trumpers. We will win!

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