Evidence of a Purple Wave?

This white guy from rural America is hardly what you expect.

Dick and Liz Cheney are the LAST Republicans I ever expected to defy party for decency.

But defections like this are becoming common.

We are mere weeks away from a Harris/Walz landslide. Don’t believe the polls. It ain’t that close. All anecdotal evidence points to a large blue wave coming. Let’s hope they win Congress, too.

Young voters and Republicans voting blue are going to turn this election. Mark my words!

WE'RE NOT GOING BACK!!!

 

THESE CRETANS!

These uneducated (presumed) white dudes, all MAGATs, all blind Trump supporters, want to remind women of their place in the home and in society. “Stay barefoot and pregnant in front of the kitchen sink” (to paraphrase VP candidate JD Vance/Hamer/Baldwin) and “Stay out of our White House.”

They’ll tell you that Kamala Harris is a “DEI hire” who is unqualified for the presidency and only rose to the position of VP by “going down on her knees.” Well, which is it, Misogynist America? Was she picked solely on race and gender? Or did she “blow her way to the top?”

These same idiots couldn't even tell you what DEI stands for, let alone SPELL IT!!!

None of them qualified for even a middle management position, yet believe this former prosecutor, Attorney General of California (border state the size of a small country) and Vice President is UNqualified to hold the highest office in the land. Let's say the Chief Operating Officer of a Fortune 500 company is promoted to CEO. Are they unqualified, too? Oh, they are...because of their race and gender, perhaps??? Your sexism and misogyny is exposed! Just quit with the dog whistles!

White dudes in America feel their grip slipping. Propping up this wannabe Dictator who is rich and white and who will "protect" their rights/power, is their last hope to hold onto power. The patriarchy is crumbling and this scares them! They want to regress instead of embrace progress and change. They believe the stereotypical myth that America was "so much greater" in the postwar flee to the suburbs where Jews, blacks and other minorities were restricted from homeownership. America was never that great for these Americans, just ask them.

I grew up watching these same whitewashed re-runs, from a bygone era in early TV days when neither a black person nor a minority (lone exceptions being Tonto on Lone Ranger and Buckwheat on Little Rascals...which were bad racial stereotypes) were represented. These false, white archetypes just bolstered the patriarchy and made sure everyone else, from women to minorities, KNEW THEIR PLACE! And this falsehood is when Trumpites (cultists) thought America was "great." It wasn't. Again, just ask the women and minorities who lived through the turbulent 1950s.

People like JD Vance/Hamer/Baldwin still believe the mythical standard set by June Cleaver is the gold standard for all women. Women everywhere are chanting the refrain, "WE'RE NOT GOING BACK!!!"

We are not. Progress demands that we look forward, we move forward. White men have had all the power forever and a day. They've believed these false 1950s stereotypes are what kept the family, the economy and America strong. But we don't live in the 1950s! We've made 70 years of progress since then...progress for women, Jewish Americans, minorities, civilization. Those who would look back through rose-colored glasses are willfully deluded. 

Take the inbreeders in the photos at the top. How would they react to an infringement on their personal rights...on their private parts? What if women said to them, "God gave you that limp dick and you should just live with it." If he wanted you to get hard and be able to impregnate a woman, he would've given you the ability. Then, they outlawed erectile dysfunction treatments of all kinds, from pills to pumps. If men were threatened with imprisonment from seeking such treatments on-line or across state lines, you'd hear a VERY DIFFERENT TAKE on bodily autonomy. But their autonomy has never been challenged or questioned. So why do they believe they have the right to limit and take away yours? That's exactly what the Dobbs decision did overturning Roe v. Wade.

The polls show a growing wave in support of Harris/Walz, including young people, disgruntled Republicans and NEVER TRUMPers of every race, creed and color. Data also shows record numbers of young people, Gen Zers who 2/3 of them hate Trump, registering to vote. If they turn up in numbers, this will be a landslide for the left! I welcome the trend towards progress. Change is good.

SYSTEMIC RACISM

I've written about race in America quite a bit in the last eight or so years because it affects me deeply and personally, like on a soul level. From the above pics, you can see that I live in a very MULTI-RACIAL family. My sister adopted an African-American sibling pair the year before I adopted my first daughter, who is white, and four years before I adopted my second daughter, who is multi-racial. So when Americans started shouting "ALL LIVES MATTER" in 2016 and again in 2020, I had to dissent. ALL lives haven't mattered even though the preamble to our Declaration of Independence signed in August 1776 PRETENDS THEY DO!

I wrote in June 2016 that "the backlash to the Black Lives Matter campaign is rooted in ignorance," and it very much is. Ignorance of history. Ignorance about white privilege and how this country was founded. "ALL MEN" were endowed with "UNALIENABLE RIGHTS." But even as our forefathers penned that, they didn't really believe that ALL LIVES MATTER. In fact, they ruled that African men were 3/5 of a human being, justifying their lower status and white ownership of slaves. The founding fathers believed in Manifest Destiny and that it was bestowed on WHITES by their Creator. Hell, it is believed that George Washington's "wooden" teeth were actually those of slaves...but I digress.

Cartoon I posted in March 2016

I concluded in my June 2016 blog post that, "It wasn't blacks who created the divide amongst humanity. By and large, it was white people. It began with the premise that races OTHER THAN white were somehow inferior. In the case of Africans, they were classified subhuman. The African slave was classified chattel. They were no different than livestock and often treated WORSE! So white people created the US v. THEM culture between themselves and everyone of a "lesser race" (blacks were often referred to as "mud race")."

That STAIN ON AMERICA is what we are still living under the dark shadow of. It is the basis for the systemic racism we see in our Institutions, from governance (at all levels) to housing policies to media disinformation. But even still, in white-controlled America, we still have African-American's towing the line to protect the status quo of racial inequality. Watch this video about Tim Scott, one-time Republican Presidential Candidate, narrated and produced by a black man who compares Scott to a "magical negro" from Hollywood lore.

Not only do "conservative blacks" like Scott distort the narrative, they effectively try to REWRITE it! And our national narrative, as told in history books and propogated by the far right, is ALREADY AS WHITEWASHED as it can possibly be. It's why Republicans vehemently OPPOSE the ideology behind Critical Race Theory and want it banned from any and all curriculum. HOW DARE BLACK PEOPLE TELL THEIR OWN STORY IN THEIR WORDS!!! White America would rather keep them shackled and muzzled. WHAT'S NEW?!?!?!

Tim Scott shucks and jives with the very best of them, selling his version of "the American Dream." Ask most African-Americans what they think about this dream! Just like the preamble to the Declaration, it's HORSE MANURE! It doesn't apply equally. What Scott's story wishes to ignore (dare I say, WHITEWASH) is the struggle his parents and grandparents faced in a country that didn't see them as equal human beings! It ignores the fact of how they even got to this country. MOSTLY BY SLAVE SHIPS ACROSS THE ATLANTIC!!!

Most Black Americans did not immigrate here BY CHOICE, they were dragged here BY FORCE in some of the MOST INHUMANE means possible! And though their blood, sweat and tears built this country, sustained the Southern U.S. Economy until the Civil War, and was spilled on the battlefield (from the U.S. Revolution through the latest conflict in Afghanistan), they were not treated as equals until the civil rights movement some 100 YEARS after Emancipation!

So spare me the false narrative Tim Scott. Even today, you could just as easily be profiled, assaulted and killed as George Floyd!

To that point, I have to worry about my own daughter.

Unless you've had to "have the talk" with your kid, YOU DON'T GET IT!

My daughter has faced micro-aggressions her whole life! She doesn't look any more African than Kamala Harris. But she's a lot more brown and "ethnic-looking" than her white friends. If a group of them is caught smoking weed (a legal drug where she lives) out in a public space, guess who the cops are going to single out! 

You don't think racism still exists in America?? YOU ARE BLIND. Maybe you're just too white and need some black friends, I don't know. But it is a SYSTEMIC problem rooted in our very dark past. It's just a fact.

And if you don't understand white privilege, I invite you to read my post from August 2017. In it, I write how us whites "benefited from the way the system had been rigged for all of history." That was an inherent privilege bestowed on us by "our Creator," I guess. It goes back centuries to Europe and the Roman Empire. It was the basis for the rise of Nazi Germany and wanting to engineer an Aryan society of blond-haried, blue-eyed whites. Nazism was very strong in America in the 1920's at the height of the KKK movement. Look it up. Manifest Destiny all over again.

The bottom line is, YOUR EXPERIENCE is not your neighbor's experience, regardless of the class or race of person he/she is. HOWEVER, the white American experience is VASTLY different than the black experience in this country, and if you'd just take the time to ask or to look into it, you'd see that. JUSTICE FOR ALL doesn't mean for folks on both sides of the tracks and it never has! We see it every day in stories of police brutality and racial profiling.

That's proof of systemic racism. It's built-in. It's always been there, from slave times forward. America is a melting pot and we all give society it's flavor. Without the black experience, told by black voices (not the Token Tim Scotts), we lose some of that flavor that makes us all Americans. I see that when I go to one of our oldest cities, New Orleans. You talk about rich American history, rooted in Europe, Africa and the Caribbean! Jazz music, which started in the Treme', a historically multi-cultural neighborhood in the heart of N'Awlins, is the most American music there is! Cultural diversity is our strenghth, not our weakness, and it should be celebrated.

This isn't my white angst or guilt coming out. I don't hate myself or the race I was born into. I had no say in the matter. Neither did my daughter. But this is deeply personal to me, not just because of her, or my brother-in-law or my many nieces and nephews. I got sick watching the original Alex Haley's Roots in the 1970's as a kid. It was so eye-opening and stomach-turning revelational to me. It changed my perceptions from then on about race and how one was so disgustingly treated. So please don't come at me with your white angst about how your power and circle of control is vanishing. White Americans will be in the minority in another couple of decades. Get used to it!

History Repeated

When I got back into a committed relationship with Lynn Ann Farber, nearly TEN YEARS TO THE DAY after we first broke up, I knew I was treading into dangerous territory filled with emotional land mines. But we both convinced ourselves to ignore the obvious red flags and warning signs. She adopted my narrative that I really only left her here in February 2014 to be with my kids. That wasn’t a complete fabrication, it just wasn’t the whole story. Our demons got the best of us and my flight response was triggered.

It took several weeks to heal and this blog captured much of it. Even though I wanted out, did the breaking up and the leaving, I was still heartbroken. My pain and recovery all spilled out into my journal and onto this site. I wish I could simply repost my March 3, 2014, post “Moving Forward.” I’ll share a couple of snippets below by screen capture, but please take the time to read the full blog post by clicking the link, above.

History, indeed, repeats itself when we don’t learn our lesson the first time.

Breaking Point?

Is American Democracy at a breaking point? I think it is. Watch this Mother Jones video to see why.

My daughters have told me for years that it’s mine and their Papaw’s generations fault for propping up the patriarchy. I cannot argue their point. We just mindlessly go along with the system that we know is horribly broken and corrupt!

I’ve felt for years that the Electoral College is skewed in favor of red, less populated areas of Rural America. The Senate, meant to level the playing field between states, gives a vastly disproportionate advantage to rural red states, like Wyoming, the least populated state in the Union. So that when the Senate votes, to say nominate a Supreme Court Justice, two votes representing just over half a million voters (580k) carries the exact same weight as two votes from California’s Senators who represent almost 40 MILLION! California has nearly the population of some countries (39.03 mil) yet in the highest legislative body shares an imbalance of power with Wyoming at 1.5% the size.

So basically a very smal minority of our citizens are actually represented in the Senate and by our Supreme Court. Shows you how the MAGA cult took over and reversed a woman’s right to bodily autonomy. If American women don’t control their own bodies, what control DO they have??

And to the point of this video, if the founding fathers who rigged the system this way, many of them slaveowners who believed black men were only 3/5 a person, HOW could they possibly write the preamble to the Declaration of Independence?

The same author featured in the Mother Jones video, above, also appeared in a Democracy NOW! video three months ago. The host of that video said the attack by the right-wing minority “violates one person, one vote,” further bolstering the populous view, especially among millennials, that our votes don’t matter, they don’t count. Author Ari Berman lays out a compelling case. Watch the above video or the one I just linked to for more.

To put an exclamation point on this post, I turn to the ladies of I’ve Had It Podcast. They point out how President Obama was ready to place Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court. Obama who won the Electoral vote AND the popular vote TWICE in 2008 and 2012, yet he was BLOCKED by Republican Mitch McConnell and Trump’s cronies in the Senate. WHY? So they could stonewall a moderate pick for a radical like Neal Gorsuch, who Trump then appointed. Trump who didn’t win the popular vote EVER!

The younger base is energized!

I blogged just ELEVEN DAYS AGO that, “Gen Z and younger millennials are going to become the main voting block in this country.” And we are seeing it happen already. In the week since KAMALA HARRIS became the Democrat’s presumptive nominee for U.S. President, voter registrations by this group have gone through the roof in states like New York and Michigan. Regisrations surged by 38,500 in just 48 hours according to Vote.org, and USA Today reported Friday that number had surpassed 100k.

Don’t believe me? I watch a lot of progressive political YouTubers like The Rational National, David Pakman, Adam Mockler and Luke Beasley and their audiences are energized, just watch this clip from Beasley’s channel.

 

The USA Today article says, “A number [of younger voters] described  themselves as ‘double-haters,’ or said they planned to turn to independent candidates if they'd bother to get off the couch at all.” They are tired of establishment Democrats, mainly old, white men, running the party and our nation’s politics. Harris, a middle aged, woman of color, has been a breath of fresh air to them and her team’s excellent use of social media, namely TikTok, has touched a nerve. On Saturday, The Guardian called it a “gen Z-powered wave of online ‘Kamalalove.'"

This surge in popularity is reflected in the polls. The same article states that Harris is up 18-20 points over DJT among voters under 30, depending on which poll you look at, NYT or Axios. It’s reflected in the energy you feel surrounding this fledgling campaign. With every TikTok that goes viral or the daily releases her campaign posts, you see these young progressives on YouTube get more on-board the “We Will Win” train.

And while this post might feel like an “I told you so,” IT IS! I’ve been saying this! I raised a 20 and 23-year-old daughter in this millennium. I’ve listened to their views on the world as well as their friends, several who are openly gay or live somewhere in the rainbow.🌈 They hate the patriarchy and were just waiting for someone like Harris to emerge to the forefront of American politics. As the USA Today article headline asserts, this presidential race just got a lot more interesting. Stay tuned.

White America, Simma Down!

In my March 2016 post about white angst, I wrote, "But the Trump phenomenon is beyond weird. He played upon the growing angst of white, conservative America. He served up, in true reality TV fashion, all the most inflammatory rhetoric he could muster, like a grand dragon at a KKK rally in the deep woods of Mississippi. He's yet to distance himself from that domestic terrorist organization, by the way." And I wrote this a full year and a half BEFORE the Charlottesville incident!

White angst is rooted in the real population data which shows a declining percentage of white Americans, down more than FIVE MILLION in the second decade of the 2000's. Pew Research Center found in 2021 that only FIVE PERCENT of Republicans think the dwindling of white Americans is "a good thing." And because the whites now feel marginalized--Native, Black and Brown Americans are saying "WELCOME TO THE CLUB!"--and their way of life under attack, they have lashed back. "This is why they cling to their 'traditional' and 'family' values. They want to believe that life was actually once like 'Leave It To Beaver' and their favorite black-and-white television shows of the 1950's. They'd like nothing more than to turn back the clock and relive those heydays of segregated bliss. They want prayer back in school, abortion abolished and white privilege to once again reign supreme," as I wrote way back when. That last line could be the promotional ad for Project 2025, Trump's current platform of Christian extremism. But I highlighted the segregation part of my quote because that gets to the root cause of white angst, a topic I've taken on several times on this blog page.

No longer in the majority, many whites feel like they're world is crumbling, like the people of color are taking over and their rights will be stripped away. To heighten those fears, the traditional, family and "Christian" values they've held since the 50's (when a lot of GOPer's were born) are no longer in the mainstream, widely accepted, adhered to or en vogue. In the 2020's we've seen church attendance dip below 50% for the FIRST TIME EVER in this country. More and more Americans are non-religious; and those who once were are no longer attending church nor are they requiring their children to attend Sunday school, VBS or youth services. Those were all things I was required or encouraged to do, growing up in a middle class, Christian American home.

But this country, sorry to tell you Heritage Foundation, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, WAS NOT FOUNDED on the Bible or Christianity. Morality DOES NOT depend on your scriptures or sacred texts. There were codes of morality in the Mesopotamian region LONG BEFORE your religion or the texts even existed. Morality is determined by humans who make the laws governing society--humans who are both influenced by religion, but also by humanism, atheism and lots of other ISMS! Quit ringing your hands that Jesus was taken out of government and the classroom. HE NEVER BELONGED THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE! Even HE washed his hands of government and politics. "Then he said to them, 'So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.'" Luke 20:25, Mark 12:17 and Matthew 20:21. So for those keeping count, that's ALL THREE Synoptic Gospels quoting Jesus on his views about taxation and government. He wasn't too concerned with it. His concern was "his father's heavenly kingdom," which he makes quite clear throughout the gospels (and might I insert here, he never once mentions homosexuality anywhere in the gospels).

So now that we've made clear that Jesus agreed with our Founding Fathers on one issue--that is separation of church and state--let's get back to our main point. White Christians, in particular, feel that they are under attack. Because they no longer control the narrative or censor Hollywood or the media or control the halls of justice, they feel marginalized and bullied. Guess what, TOUGH SHIT! You controlled the narrative for long enough! Ever since the Roman Empire co-opted Christianity, white Europeans have controlled the narrative, written and told the story still printed in our history textbooks today. Talk about INDOCTRINATION!?!?! When was the minority view ever considered? When were they're stories ever told?

Only since the civil rights movement of the 1960's have we even BEGUN to learn about black and brown contributions to our great country. Only in recent decades have the voices of Native Americans been heard. ALL OF THOSE MARGINALIZED PEOPLES since the beginning of Western Civilization contributed greatly to our history! Think of the Native American code breakers who assisted our war effort, the black Union soldiers (and black veterans in every war since) who left their blood on battlefields around the South and the World, the migrant workers who put half of the produce in your local Walmart, etc...they have helped to shape America into the inclusive, representative republic that it was supposed to be. Their stories are finally getting added to the history books, but not without white backlash. Take for example, Critical Race Theory and how angry that made white Christians and other conservatives. HOW DARE THEY HAVE A VOICE! DON'T 'THOSE PEOPLE' KNOW THEIR PLACE???!

Which brings us back to whites becoming the minority. When you are the minority, your stories don't get to dominate the history books, the media, the collective narrative anymore. Again, WELCOME TO THE CLUB! How does it feel to get a taste of your own medicine???

Like I wrote in March 2016, "white privilege breeds fear and it has ever since the end of slavery." Conservatives who want to roll back time and "Make America Great Again," are just perpetuating age-old stereotypes, now including brown immigrants, and preying on white people's fear, their angst. Back in the 1870's, they didn't know what to do with newly freed slaves roaming the countryside, looking for work, housing, equal rights to free white citizens, so there was a huge backlash. Enter the Jim Crow era for the next 100 years!! And now, since civil rights assured them their equality, we are seeing the same Jim Crow-like backlash. It's called Project 2025 and the new, more aggressive, more fascist Trump regime. He's preying on that white angst like a mother####er!

Those "Christian values" they hold so dear are the same ones that "put Africans in shackles, Native Americans on reservations, turned a blind eye to the mostly Jewish Holocaust, interred Japanese-Americans and now wants to deport every 'illegal' back to their homeland," I wrote in 2016. Are the whites now afraid of a new black and brown backlash? That the same oppression they perpetuated for millenia will be brought back to bear on them??? Is that their fear? "Did the African-American President ever open those FEMA camps to inter white folks? Has any minority--Latino or otherwise--ever considered putting privileged white folks in shackles and selling them into slavery? So what are they so scared of?"

We've seen how the Establishment of old, rich white dudes react every time black or brown people seek to be heard, whether it's kneeling through an anthem or marching to protest George Floyd's death. I wrote in October 2017, "It's like a sudden eruption of white-hot angst from just below the surface that bubbles over in the form of hate, outrage and bigotry." And now that a WOMAN OF COLOR will probably be the next Democratic candidate for President, watch how the right responds. We already know how the white Christian right feels, it's in their manifesto (Project '25).

Their fear is that eons of "white privilege" is slowly being eroded away due to the fact that they will SOON no longer be in the majority. The socialist redistribution of wealth is a threat to the stranglehold they've had on this country since it's foundation. This is at the heart of their angst. This is why conservatives have aligned themselves with hate groups (like in Charlottesville, 2017) who shout, "WHITE POWER!" They are not ready to give over their privilege or their power. It causes them to lash out in anger and support a neo-Fascist (but only on Day One, right?) who whips them into a frenzy, even leading them to attack our government (like on Jan 6, 2021), to deny election results and to hate their black and brown neighbors--both legal and illegal. See my post from May 2019, "White Privilege Breeds White Nationalism."

It's about to all play out again this November and probably in January, when the election results are contested by the Orange Cult Leader and his minions.

I'm just going to need the white Christian nationalists and those worried about their white privilege, to sit down and simmer down! We've heard ENOUGH out of you. Let the black and brown people speak. It's their turn now.