I'm stunned that Trump's minions had the audacity to threaten your parents..... that's outrageous! What is wrong with those people?? 😠. This is what Trump does, in typical orange Mussolini style, gives tacit permission to his deluded cult members to threaten others, ridicule others and cause violence in society. It's wrong, it's heinous and it must be stopped. I do hope the government can track them down and hold them accountable. I'm so sorry you and your family have to cope with this vile garbage. I pray for you all and send up positive energy for protection against those despicable people who do these horrible things. Be safe, thank you for the great work you're doing, I appreciate it. 🙏
for some good news, I just posted a short article on the powerful new cohort of young first-time voters who constitute 20% of the 2024 electorate. And they aren't Trump-lovers.
Vance is just another grifter - so called Hillbilly has a law degree from Yale;
i read his book and it's a huge put-down of those base voters - they're lazy, opioid-addicted, govt-dependent losers that he escapes from (rises above) in the book - but now he's courting them (he must figure they didn't read his book).
just another lying grifter, and bankrolled by another Silicone Valley billionaire looking for access to power.
Rick, Send those f’ing assholes threatening your parents to this 81 year old retired ICU nurse. I won’t take their shit and will tell them to go fuck themselves in a heartbeat.
If Trump would win the election (god forbid) he better watch his back. Vance plans on being our dictator and will insure that the next attempt won’t miss. Trump is expendable to Vance and his handlers.
Vance is scary; he's a phoney grifter, pure opportunist, but he doesn't have the smarts. All he has is a billionaire backer, but when Vance says stuff like "childless cat ladies" and people without children their vote should count less, and then try to cover it all up with I was only joking, well he's a phoney and an amateur grifter, and even Trump has buyer's remorse, but he's stuck with him.
Whoever Kamala picks as VP will clean Vance's clock.
I want to share my concern for your elderly parents. I can only hope that the FBI and Secret Service can ferret out the criminals. taRump is not smart, JD Vance is the weird guy in the video. He has to answer for his “couch”. Keep taRump crazy, crazy, spinning his wheels or the hamster wheel in his head. Harris is a funny woman and has a sense of humor. And so glad that she is personable, and garnering the support that she has. I hope he keeps talking crazy, because voters will run to the polls to vote Harris and VP select for the win.
We need to exploit "Trumps Stupid". He did say he wanted to sell Puerto Rico and buy Greenland. He wanted to nuke a hurricane. Has a Hannibal Lecter fantasy. His obsession with water in his bathtub. Crowd Size. Calling war heroes suckers. And all his fucking lies.
It seems that the new most simple and direct approach is calling him “WEIRD” and I like it. I see it coming from Kamala Harris's campaign. Neat and tidy. “The simplest things work.”
Rick, last night i watched Alexandra Pelosi's "The Insurrectionist Next Door" - up close and personal interviews with people who were convicted and jailed for Jan.6, and these people were SCARY! All misfits, discontented, alienated, into weird shit, the flotsam and jetsam of America, all believing to the death that Trump won in 2020 and they were the Patriots saving America.
Stupid, angry, dangerous, ... nothing has scared me more than these Jan.6 folks.
And to think that Trump says he'll pardon and release them back into society.
And yes, Trump is definitely "trying out new lines" like yesterday's speech at some religious convention that "if you elect me in November you'll never have to vote again."
Dems should be running that clip over and over and over and over and over.
On the one hand, I'm relieved that Joe stepped down (as you say, graciously and elegantly), that her A-Team planned and executed the most successful candidate roll-out in history, that she has turned the whole thing around and the necessary Blue-Tsunami has begun;
On the other hand, the wacko-creeps who threatened your parents and the dangerous nut-bars in Pelosi's documentary scare the shit out of me.
So the victory will have to be massive (hopefully House, Senate, WH) or it'll Jan.6 on steroids.
Keep up the good work, and, having published a little newsletter of my own, I know the time that goes into these things, so I'm signing on as a Paid Subscriber. A small step to help Defeat Trump.
Rick, standing with you and your family in solidarity. These people who would threaten you, your parents and pets aren't worthy to be called the worst pejorative my mind can think of.
The Republican strategists had planned to target women voters in this campaign.
But Trump and Vance mis-read the memo and thought "target women voters" meant to insult them at every turn.
Trump-Vance don't seem to understand that when they call Kamala mean, nasty, slept her way to the top, a DEI hire, dumb as a rock, and yesterday's brilliant comment "she's a bum", while Dem leaders are 'childless cat ladies" and "Dems are anti-family" - well, they're just driving women voters away in droves, right over to the Dems.
Plus, the whole demographic composition of the electorate has changed, but Trump-Vance are still just playing to their base.
It's a self-destructive campaign, and the further behind they fall, the uglier it will get.
But hopefully we're seeing the beginnings of that Blue Wave that will be needed to win House, Senate & WH, in (as someone quoted Glenn Kirschner) "numbers too big to rig and too real to steal"
Two more weeks of media attention on Kamala's VP pick, then saturation coverage of the DNC convention, along with steadily rising poll numbers, and by mid-August that Blue Wave should be really building.
And Trump, desperate to make the headlines, will spew more and more outrageous shit: yesterday he said "if you elect me you'll never have to vote again."
So my hope is up, but as we see in Rick's commentary, these guys are dangerous and scary and we can't take anything for granted.
I’m sorry to hear about the threats against your parents! I hope ( and am sure it’s the case) they are well protected. I do wish you had addressed the more serious pushback against VP Harris, particularly calling her a DEI hire and saying she slept her way to success. These are the misogynistic attacks that Hillary dealt with albeit in another form. I do believe we as a country are better prepared for it this time. I also think the VP will respond in different ways that are more forceful than Hillary.
The attacks against Hillary were steeped in misogyny to be perfectly sure, but they were also enabled by a 30-year character assassination campaign against both Clintons by the right. Obama's race in a way was a superpower defense, because bald racist attacks immediately provoked a backlash from both black and white people. So the right quickly pivoted to other Scary Black Man tropes, including that his pastor declaimed "god damn America" from the pulpit, which led to Obama's Philadelphia address on racial issues. Obama was no Scary Black Man; he spent his entire life being the Unthreatening Black Man, entirely in the mainstream.
Obama let himself be a political Rorschach inkblot; progressives glommed onto him as their avatar, but from his first foreign policy address I recognized him as a neoliberal Washington Consensus guy, ideologically not much different (if at all) from Bill Clinton. When the more overt Scary Black Man stuff didn't stick, they reverted to painting him as a hyper-liberal "Marxist." Despite not going after the financial meltdown perps and stocking his financial team with Wall St. insiders whose Austerity-mindedness prolonged the recovery from the Great Recession for eight long and unnecessary years, that image did stick and hobbled Obama's ability to work with Republicans. Joe's presidency was much more legislatively successful. Joe learned from this experience and told the inflation spooked neoliberals to go eff themselves.
This is why Bernie sings Joe's praises as a true man of the working class and has yet to give a full-throated endorsement to Kamala (though, like with Hillary, he's campaigning for her).
The revolting, sexualized misogynoir attacks on Kamala stick not at all with millennials and gen z and will only bind them more tightly to her. But it's an interesting question when we come to Kamala's ideology. She didn't run as a hard leftist for CA AG; this was years before "woke Soros prosecutors" was a thing. She did decline to recommend the death penalty for a cop killer and while DiFi didn't like that, being opposed to the death penalty on both moral and prudential grounds is a fairly mainstream Democratic position. She caught far more hell from the left for being hard on the parents of truants and this earned her the progressive epithet of "cop."
It would have been more natural in the '20 presidential primary for Kamala to run in the center lane with Joe, Pete, Amy and Corey, but she chose to run in the left lane with Liz and Bernie, and I think this was her campaign's fatal mistake. The cringey aspects of her demeanor made it clear she wasn't fully comfortable with this, while taking strong positions on every marquee progressive issue, saying supportive words about (though not fully endorsing) Defund The Police, endorsing a fracking ban, going after Big Fossil, advocating the Green New Deal, attempting (and failing) to hammer out a credible concrete plan for Medicare-For-All. GOP oppo is looking at this as an embarrassment of riches. But it's unlikely to stick very much.
Millennials and gen z take these "too liberal for America" positions as gospel (about time!), not to mention old-school liberal boomers like Yours Truly. I'm a pragmatic voter in general elections but a left-liberal in primaries and I do what Rick Wilson says you're not supposed to do, which is obsess over issues. I love it when primary candidates come out with 10-point plans. Kamala's failure to impress Bernie and Liz-leaning progressives may turn out to be a blessing in disguise, now that she's secured the nomination. VP Harris, more comfortable with the big picture than the devilish details, is articulate and intelligent enough to be able to frame these positions (or her current ones) in an unthreatening way that voters of all ideological stripes can understand.
So sorry about your parents, hope they find them and fast. AND, what poetic justice that they framed the entire race about “the old guy” and then now have to deal with it. Kinda like stepping on a rake and it hits you in the head. Make the bed now lie in it… and on and on. As always, you pull no punches and tell it straight up.
Dear Rick,
I'm stunned that Trump's minions had the audacity to threaten your parents..... that's outrageous! What is wrong with those people?? 😠. This is what Trump does, in typical orange Mussolini style, gives tacit permission to his deluded cult members to threaten others, ridicule others and cause violence in society. It's wrong, it's heinous and it must be stopped. I do hope the government can track them down and hold them accountable. I'm so sorry you and your family have to cope with this vile garbage. I pray for you all and send up positive energy for protection against those despicable people who do these horrible things. Be safe, thank you for the great work you're doing, I appreciate it. 🙏
for some good news, I just posted a short article on the powerful new cohort of young first-time voters who constitute 20% of the 2024 electorate. And they aren't Trump-lovers.
https://kamala4prez.substack.com/p/a-new-younger-electorate-for-2024
Rick, Vance keeps changing his name for one of two reasons: looking for the right gravitas when his name is spoken or running from the law.
Vance is just another grifter - so called Hillbilly has a law degree from Yale;
i read his book and it's a huge put-down of those base voters - they're lazy, opioid-addicted, govt-dependent losers that he escapes from (rises above) in the book - but now he's courting them (he must figure they didn't read his book).
just another lying grifter, and bankrolled by another Silicone Valley billionaire looking for access to power.
Thanks, Pam. I've just about had enough.
Stay safe, Rick. We pray for your safety and the safety of your family.
You've inspired my new motto: Against fascists, the high road leads to the gas chambers.
Rick, Send those f’ing assholes threatening your parents to this 81 year old retired ICU nurse. I won’t take their shit and will tell them to go fuck themselves in a heartbeat.
If Trump would win the election (god forbid) he better watch his back. Vance plans on being our dictator and will insure that the next attempt won’t miss. Trump is expendable to Vance and his handlers.
Vance is scary; he's a phoney grifter, pure opportunist, but he doesn't have the smarts. All he has is a billionaire backer, but when Vance says stuff like "childless cat ladies" and people without children their vote should count less, and then try to cover it all up with I was only joking, well he's a phoney and an amateur grifter, and even Trump has buyer's remorse, but he's stuck with him.
Whoever Kamala picks as VP will clean Vance's clock.
I want to share my concern for your elderly parents. I can only hope that the FBI and Secret Service can ferret out the criminals. taRump is not smart, JD Vance is the weird guy in the video. He has to answer for his “couch”. Keep taRump crazy, crazy, spinning his wheels or the hamster wheel in his head. Harris is a funny woman and has a sense of humor. And so glad that she is personable, and garnering the support that she has. I hope he keeps talking crazy, because voters will run to the polls to vote Harris and VP select for the win.
We need to exploit "Trumps Stupid". He did say he wanted to sell Puerto Rico and buy Greenland. He wanted to nuke a hurricane. Has a Hannibal Lecter fantasy. His obsession with water in his bathtub. Crowd Size. Calling war heroes suckers. And all his fucking lies.
It seems that the new most simple and direct approach is calling him “WEIRD” and I like it. I see it coming from Kamala Harris's campaign. Neat and tidy. “The simplest things work.”
Don-OLD
not to mention he's a flat-out certifiable psychopath:
here's the forensic test for psychopathy:
https://kamala4prez.substack.com/p/is-donald-trump-a-psychopath
I score Trump 7 out of 7 on this psychopath scale.
Rick, last night i watched Alexandra Pelosi's "The Insurrectionist Next Door" - up close and personal interviews with people who were convicted and jailed for Jan.6, and these people were SCARY! All misfits, discontented, alienated, into weird shit, the flotsam and jetsam of America, all believing to the death that Trump won in 2020 and they were the Patriots saving America.
Stupid, angry, dangerous, ... nothing has scared me more than these Jan.6 folks.
And to think that Trump says he'll pardon and release them back into society.
And yes, Trump is definitely "trying out new lines" like yesterday's speech at some religious convention that "if you elect me in November you'll never have to vote again."
Dems should be running that clip over and over and over and over and over.
On the one hand, I'm relieved that Joe stepped down (as you say, graciously and elegantly), that her A-Team planned and executed the most successful candidate roll-out in history, that she has turned the whole thing around and the necessary Blue-Tsunami has begun;
On the other hand, the wacko-creeps who threatened your parents and the dangerous nut-bars in Pelosi's documentary scare the shit out of me.
So the victory will have to be massive (hopefully House, Senate, WH) or it'll Jan.6 on steroids.
Keep up the good work, and, having published a little newsletter of my own, I know the time that goes into these things, so I'm signing on as a Paid Subscriber. A small step to help Defeat Trump.
Rick, standing with you and your family in solidarity. These people who would threaten you, your parents and pets aren't worthy to be called the worst pejorative my mind can think of.
The Republican strategists had planned to target women voters in this campaign.
But Trump and Vance mis-read the memo and thought "target women voters" meant to insult them at every turn.
Trump-Vance don't seem to understand that when they call Kamala mean, nasty, slept her way to the top, a DEI hire, dumb as a rock, and yesterday's brilliant comment "she's a bum", while Dem leaders are 'childless cat ladies" and "Dems are anti-family" - well, they're just driving women voters away in droves, right over to the Dems.
Plus, the whole demographic composition of the electorate has changed, but Trump-Vance are still just playing to their base.
It's a self-destructive campaign, and the further behind they fall, the uglier it will get.
But hopefully we're seeing the beginnings of that Blue Wave that will be needed to win House, Senate & WH, in (as someone quoted Glenn Kirschner) "numbers too big to rig and too real to steal"
Two more weeks of media attention on Kamala's VP pick, then saturation coverage of the DNC convention, along with steadily rising poll numbers, and by mid-August that Blue Wave should be really building.
And Trump, desperate to make the headlines, will spew more and more outrageous shit: yesterday he said "if you elect me you'll never have to vote again."
So my hope is up, but as we see in Rick's commentary, these guys are dangerous and scary and we can't take anything for granted.
I’m sorry to hear about the threats against your parents! I hope ( and am sure it’s the case) they are well protected. I do wish you had addressed the more serious pushback against VP Harris, particularly calling her a DEI hire and saying she slept her way to success. These are the misogynistic attacks that Hillary dealt with albeit in another form. I do believe we as a country are better prepared for it this time. I also think the VP will respond in different ways that are more forceful than Hillary.
Hillary was right: it WAS a vast right-wing conspiracy and we’re seeing its fruition now. They played the long game.
The attacks against Hillary were steeped in misogyny to be perfectly sure, but they were also enabled by a 30-year character assassination campaign against both Clintons by the right. Obama's race in a way was a superpower defense, because bald racist attacks immediately provoked a backlash from both black and white people. So the right quickly pivoted to other Scary Black Man tropes, including that his pastor declaimed "god damn America" from the pulpit, which led to Obama's Philadelphia address on racial issues. Obama was no Scary Black Man; he spent his entire life being the Unthreatening Black Man, entirely in the mainstream.
Obama let himself be a political Rorschach inkblot; progressives glommed onto him as their avatar, but from his first foreign policy address I recognized him as a neoliberal Washington Consensus guy, ideologically not much different (if at all) from Bill Clinton. When the more overt Scary Black Man stuff didn't stick, they reverted to painting him as a hyper-liberal "Marxist." Despite not going after the financial meltdown perps and stocking his financial team with Wall St. insiders whose Austerity-mindedness prolonged the recovery from the Great Recession for eight long and unnecessary years, that image did stick and hobbled Obama's ability to work with Republicans. Joe's presidency was much more legislatively successful. Joe learned from this experience and told the inflation spooked neoliberals to go eff themselves.
This is why Bernie sings Joe's praises as a true man of the working class and has yet to give a full-throated endorsement to Kamala (though, like with Hillary, he's campaigning for her).
The revolting, sexualized misogynoir attacks on Kamala stick not at all with millennials and gen z and will only bind them more tightly to her. But it's an interesting question when we come to Kamala's ideology. She didn't run as a hard leftist for CA AG; this was years before "woke Soros prosecutors" was a thing. She did decline to recommend the death penalty for a cop killer and while DiFi didn't like that, being opposed to the death penalty on both moral and prudential grounds is a fairly mainstream Democratic position. She caught far more hell from the left for being hard on the parents of truants and this earned her the progressive epithet of "cop."
It would have been more natural in the '20 presidential primary for Kamala to run in the center lane with Joe, Pete, Amy and Corey, but she chose to run in the left lane with Liz and Bernie, and I think this was her campaign's fatal mistake. The cringey aspects of her demeanor made it clear she wasn't fully comfortable with this, while taking strong positions on every marquee progressive issue, saying supportive words about (though not fully endorsing) Defund The Police, endorsing a fracking ban, going after Big Fossil, advocating the Green New Deal, attempting (and failing) to hammer out a credible concrete plan for Medicare-For-All. GOP oppo is looking at this as an embarrassment of riches. But it's unlikely to stick very much.
Millennials and gen z take these "too liberal for America" positions as gospel (about time!), not to mention old-school liberal boomers like Yours Truly. I'm a pragmatic voter in general elections but a left-liberal in primaries and I do what Rick Wilson says you're not supposed to do, which is obsess over issues. I love it when primary candidates come out with 10-point plans. Kamala's failure to impress Bernie and Liz-leaning progressives may turn out to be a blessing in disguise, now that she's secured the nomination. VP Harris, more comfortable with the big picture than the devilish details, is articulate and intelligent enough to be able to frame these positions (or her current ones) in an unthreatening way that voters of all ideological stripes can understand.
This was extra good today! Sorry about your folks though.
So sorry about your parents, hope they find them and fast. AND, what poetic justice that they framed the entire race about “the old guy” and then now have to deal with it. Kinda like stepping on a rake and it hits you in the head. Make the bed now lie in it… and on and on. As always, you pull no punches and tell it straight up.