DAVID REMNICK ~

TRUMP,  PUTIN,  AND

THE BIG HACK

By David Remnick

"If these declassified intelligence reports are true, how is it possible to count the 2016 Presidential election as unsullied?"

RICHARD RORTY ~

Harvard, 1998

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[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. …

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

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R I C H A R D      R O R T Y,  1998

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MARGARET RANDALL ~

M A R G A R E T      R A N D A L L

"This is an urgent call. Those who haven't seen the PBS Frontline special "The Choice-2016" should watch it. I realize many of us are sicker than usual of the campaign spectacle this time around. It makes us ill. We think we cannot watch or listen to another sound bite, even from the candidate of our choice. But I urge you to watch this Frontline video for several reasons. First, it is brilliant. Second, it traces Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton from their childhoods so that we come away with an in-depth sense of who they are and how they became who they are. Third--and perhaps most importantly--watching this special we learn that Trump is far more dangerous than anything we may previously have understood. Trump is not simply a self-serving lying megalomaniac racist, sexist and xenophobe. He is a eugenicist. This means that he believes there are some human beings who are genetically superior to others. This was Hitler's philosophy. I sympathize with those in this country who favor a third political party. Who wouldn't like to see our two-party system open to include other truly competitive possibilities. But preventing a Trump presidency is too important right now to be supporting Jill Stein, whose ideology we may appreciate, or Gary Johnson, who doesn't recognize the word Aleppo and cannot name a single foreign leader he admires. The race is too close. The stakes are too high. Watch "The Choice-2016" and then do everything in your power to elect Hillary Clinton, no matter what disagreements you may have with some of her policies. If she doesn't win, it will be too late to bemoan a government in the hands of Mike Pence (whose hero is Dick Cheney), a Supreme Court capable of pushing back every gain we have made in the past many decades, despair among righteously desperate working people who believed they could trust a strongman to fix their lives, and "law and order" rather than the healing of our communities."
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M A R G A R E T      R A N D A L L
from MR Facebook page, September 29, 2016
Reprinted by permission of the author


F R O N T L I N E ` "The Choice 2016"