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A Direct Appeal to Kos: Remember Our Roots. It's Time to Fight [1]

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

Date: 2025-07-09

Some time last week, under crying skies, two friends of mine drowned in Texas. Miles away, on a website dedicated to creating a better tomorrow through progressive news and activism, dozens of people in dozens of ways decide similar deaths were the victims’ own fault, a consequence of their presumed ideologies. It’s no longer a typical case. But you can’t tell me, Kos, that this is what you wanted when you founded this site.

I have seen too many stories on here, I have talked too many friends off the ledges of self harm and suicide due to the news they read, and I have seen the quality of reporting here sink into its own flood of panic and grief, reinforced by a community that seems unable to escape, feeding off more and more despair and schadenfreude. So the question must be asked: what is the purpose of this place? Are we a news site? Are we a site for activists? Or do we now exist primarily for Substackers to republish yellow journalism pieces for a few extra clicks?

Over the last few months here, any kind of rationality, optimism or hope for the future has become a virus that this community has been encouraged to mask up against as if it were an actual pandemic. This is despite many facts to the contrary. The arguments are worst case scenario and all well-worn at this point. But just because a few people on here wear them like masks and apply them like sanitizer doesn’t make them true.

This used to be a place where we would build on wins like in the Iowa State Senate and in Wisconsin and in Aurora, Illinois and in Omaha and in the Pennsylvania State Senate and in the New York State Senate and of course in New York. Now it’s a place where electoralism itself is regularly questioned. A place that no longer even has a dedicated section for elections.

This used to be a place where it was conventional wisdom, and for good reason, that the right would divide itself and shed its political capital at a record rate under Trump. And despite one MAGA civil war followed by right wing influencers jumping ship, another civil war, the nonsense with that fool Epstein, and the formation of a new political party, the new conventional wisdom is that Trump and the right are united and unstoppable. That resistance is essentially futile.

This used to be a place where human life was valued and human dignity protected. Now it’s a place where a rural hospital stays closed and the top recommended comment is a cheery “die quickly!” A comment that will stick with me a long time and echo in the back of my head every time I think about my friend’s family being found floating and alone in Texas floodwaters.

What cyclone of tragedy have we wrought here, and why do we want it? Does the world need another doomer site where progressives can sign up for their latest mental health spiral? Don’t we have enough enlightened new left streamers doing that for us? Do we not know how this damages the movement? It’s well established that fear and negativity bias cause us to disengage and check out of our activism, that it can also damage outside perception of a movement, and that repeatedly beating the drumbeat of already bad news worsens its already existing effects on mental health. So why is Daily Kos, a site that prides itself on being something truly different, jumping on this bandwagon and amplifying it to new heights? Do we really believe accurate reporting requires the “we’re all doomed” aesthetic?

We worry about the Justice Department investigating us, but at the moment I wonder why they would. The hard truth is that this site has become so good at scaring the shit out of people and preaching the inevitability of a fascist hellscape that Trump should honor it with a plaque.

This is the moment Daily Kos was built for and you cannot let it unravel now, not in the face of a historically unpopular president with an agenda that people are actually paying attention to for once. Never has electing more and truly better and actually progressive Democrats mattered like it does today. Never has rallying people to activism mattered more than it does right now. Daily Kos cannot afford to become just another fundraising email with the same buzzwords in the subject line. We cannot allow the siren song of hopelessness and fascist propaganda to become conventional wisdom in the hopes it will generate enough traffic to keep a website going. If we are here, and if we care about this place, we have a moral obligation and a sacred duty: to inform progressives, to empower progressives, and to lead progressives to victory.

So I need to know where this place stands. Because I might have to have some very difficult conversations in the very near future, ones yet again full of grief and tears. And if someone asks me who’s out there trying to stop all of this, who doesn’t believe the lies, who’s ready to actually resist, I need to be able to give them an honest answer.

In 2016, in the aftermath of the election, you were more than clear that our answer was to resist: in every way possible, with everything we have, until final victory. In your relative silence after 2024, doubters and doomers have crept in from the corners like vines over the fence, entangling and immobilizing us. Will that be the final chapter? Will those of us like me, despite our best efforts, be fighting alone?

Or will we wake the fuck up and remember why we’re here?

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/7/9/2332588/-A-Direct-Appeal-to-Kos-Remember-Our-Roots-It-s-Time-to-Fight?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web

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