Category: Cold Civil War

Trump’s Campaign Colluded With Russians. Now What. #Resist

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

It’s pretty obvious that we now have proof that the 2016 Trump Campaign knowingly and in a systematic manner colluded with the Russian government to rig the election in their favor.

The question, of course, is now what?

I’m afraid we’re just going to have to wait and hope that Congress is flipped in 2018. That’s all I got. I say that because, well, the Republican Party is so surreal in its partisanship that they would rather protect treasonous behavior on the part of Trump than potentially risk the passage of an enormous tax cut for the wealthiest amongst us.

So, in short, we’re fucked. We are so completely fucked that this lurch towards authoritarianism will grind on for at least another year. In the end, I think this scandal will be a lot like Iran-Contra. We’ll know the facts, the president might even admit what happened and say something akin to “I’m sorry,” but ultimately we won’t get rid of the fucker in any meaningful way.

I fear that even if we do flip Congress and impeach Trump, he won’t be convicted by the Senate. Or if he is convicted by the Senate, I worry he won’t see the vote as legitimate and we’ll have shoot out on the West Lawn between the FBI and the Secret Service.

The prospects of things going back to normal are extremely dim. We’ve entered a new age and the future is dark for the American Republic. I think when we look back upon this period 20 years from now, we’ll see it as the period where the United States finally transitioned from a constitutional democratic republic to an theocratic, autocratic quasi-fascist state.

Is 2018 Our 1968? Next Year May Be A Crucial Year In American History #Resist

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

The thing we have to understand is that because of gerrymandering, The Resistance could win 54% of the popular vote and still lose the House to Republicans. Let that sink in. That’s why if you love the United States as I do, you may have to seriously contemplate getting out of your comfort zone and begin to actively participate in politics in a way you never have.

The 2018 mid-terms are so crucial because House Republicans are so Vichy and callow that if we don’t vote them out of office in a big way, the morphing of the United States into autocracy. Trump is doing real damage to the American Republic and if nothing happens to change the current chronic Constitutional long-jam we’re in, there may be no stopping Trump completely seizing power.

There is an ebb and flow to politics and it was inevitable that Republicans would come back into power. What we didn’t fully appreciate is the hysterical rage caused by the bullshit echo chamber epitomized by FOX News would make the Republicans so bad at governing. So, we have a historical imperative to throw them out of office in at least the House, if not the Senate. If we could flip the Senate, then we could end the appointment of extremely Right wing, extremely unqualified judges to the federal bench. But we’re kind of desperate, so we need the House to flip more than anything else.

A lot of things could go wrong between now and November 2018. Chief amongst them being, Trump could do his failsafe and start a preemptive war against the DPRK. This is a serious possibility that we need to see with clear eyes. We can’t take for granted that Trump will “do the right thing” and not kill a few hundred thousand people by prompting the North Koreans to freak the fuck out. I am of the opinion that they have a vested interest in not starting a war on their own simply for the reason that they know that in the end they will lose, and lose badly.

Regardless, there is a real chance that 2018 will go down as 1968 as a year where the universe changed in a big way. In many ways, 1968 marked the beginning of the modern age and it will be interesting to see of something similar happens in 2018. We face a historical turning point. Either the Republic fails and we become an autocracy, or it bounces back and Trump is destroyed politically.

I am not very sanguine about our prospects. It seems as though the Republic has fallen already and we’re a “managed democracy” like they have in Russia. It’s all over but the shouting, as the say. But we have a small window of opportunity in 2018. It’s possible, just possible that I’m wrong.

One thing is for sure, we need new leadership. We need a new generation of people to fight the good fight. The current crop of leaders is old and out of touch. Trump isn’t going anywhere, but maybe we can mitigate his damage if we manage to flip Congress in 2018.

Talk To Me Internet: #Feminism, #TrumpRussia #Startup #Romance

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Talk to Me Internet
In this one, I talk about middle aged #romance, #feminism, #feminist theory, not having a crush anymore and #Trump and #TrumpRussia. I also talk a little bit about #writing a #novel and a #startup to “kill” Twitter.

American Autocracy #Resist

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

It is too easy to look at the developments of the last year and say, “Lulz, nothing matters!” But that would be a grave injustice to the American experiment in self-governance. We are now in dangerous territory. We like to think only places like Russia and Turkey can succumb to the power of an autocrat and become a “managed democracy.”

At least, that’s what I used to think.

But recent developments make me realize that unless something changes we are slouching towards a new era in American governance. A number of things are coming together at the same time. Dark money, the rise of the Steve Bannon style of populism as well as Donald Trump himself are all shaking the foundations of the American Republic.

If this was an earlier age, historians would say our Republic was gradually slipping into an Empire, with a very specific quirk: the Emperor was elected every four years, but in fact only left office because the Constitution limited him or her to eight years in office. What’s more troublesome is it’s possible America is going to lurch into a “managed democracy” — or already has — and there’s no going back. When a nation has become so divided and partisan that not even accusations of pedophilia can knock a US Senate candidate as Alabama’s Roy Moore out of the race, you know something’s wrong.

All of this leads to the question of what to do. Are we doomed? Is this how the American democratic constitutional Republic ends? Are just one stop away from becoming a quasi-theocratic fascistic state?

Every time I get despondent and assume the worst, I realize I just can’t give up. I just can’t give up on the traditional concept of the United States that I was born to assume was always there. Here are some ideas on how to if not fix, at least ameliorate the problems facing us.

Don’t Enrage, Engage
This is something that the individual can do, regardless of social status or power. Instead of living in your personal political bubble, be willing to engage in cogent political discourse with someone who disagrees with you. Doing so in person is even better. President Obama said something to this effect in his parting speech. Social media — especially how easily it is to for outside forces to influence it — may be what we look back as the deathblow to our American democracy. We have to engage. We have to at least attempt to talk to people we don’t agree with, even if they are angry and think everything we believe is “fake news.” This is really tough and even I find myself not doing it nearly as much as I should.

Liberals Need More Empathy
I’m not suggesting liberals have to compromise everything they believe in. But liberals need to at least attempt to understand why they’re hated so much. Liberals are hated so much that the people who hate them don’t even really understand why they hate them. Liberals too often come off as smug. About half the country is really hurting and is only going to hurt more as technology takes low skill, high wage jobs like truck driver away. It’s a delicate balance given how the Right is full of rage and absolutely refuses to compromise in any way. The Right wants absolute power and absolute victory at all costs and liberals need to take this cold hard fact seriously.

Those are two pretty easy fixes, now let’s move on to some more existential solutions that are probably significantly more difficult to implement.

We Need A New Social Media Platform
We need to burn the village to save it. We need to kill Twitter. Twitter is a real threat to our democracy. I have repeatedly suggested that a new platform designed from the ground up to address the problems of Twitter should be designed. It also might be used to aide and abet people who wanted to protest the Trump Administration should it do something drastic like fire Bob Mueller. A new social media platform designed to fix the problems of Twitter marketed correctly would probably be a success from the get-go for several reasons. A lot of Left leaning celebrities would flock to such a service if they felt more safe. They, in turn, would bring fans and content along with them.

We Need New Leaders
If the rise of Donald Trump has show us anything, it’s that the world of celebrity and entertainment is now completely fused with politics. The center-Left needs to fight fire with fire and recruit leaders from the entertainment industry. I would suggest someone like Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert would be a great start. But, really, I would even go so far as to say someone like Chelsea Handler might do the trick given how costic our political life has become.

Those solutions, too, don’t even begin to address the deep seated problems with the American Republic. The United States really is two different nations now and it is up to us to prevent a civil war. It is very possible that the Blue States will bolt the United States for no other reason than they feel they are no longer welcome. It will be interesting to see how that exactly plays out.

Should the worse happen and Trump fire Bob Mueller the gauntlet will be thrown down, the Rubicon will be crossed. We get our answer. We will learn once and for all if “American exceptionalism” has at last come to an end.

Shelton Bumgarner is a writer and photographer living in Richmond, Va. You can reach him at migukin (at) gmail.com.

Is It Even Possible To Engage Trump Supporters At This Point? #Resist

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Something I struggle with is engaging Trump supporters. I struggle to understand their psychology. I worry that if people like me dismiss Trumpist out of hand, that will lead to some very bad things down the road. Like, actual violence in the United States as the county finally tears itself apart like a sinking Titanic.

It is really easy — intellectually lazy, even — to do just that. To simply wince, wave your hand and assume that because Trump supporters continue to be sycophants for a racist, misogynistic bigot that they aren’t worth talking to.

I have struggled to talk to them since Trump got elected and more often than not, I just got angry. One of the more difficult issues to address when it comes to Trump supporters is their America First isolationism. For a “globalist cuck” like myself, it’s difficult for me to grok someone who completely rejects something that seems pretty self-evident: that the United States having a proactive foreign policy is a force for good across the globe. How do you engage someone who rejects 70 years of conventional wisdom? That particular issue is so difficult for me to process that I simply don’t know where to begin.

I don’t know if I’m not smart enough or what when it comes to this particular issue. How do you address the world view of someone who rejects the basis of Pax Americana? They want America to turn inward in a way not seen since before World War II. I just don’t have a ready argument for people who reject any source of facts I might produce on the matter as “fake news.”

But I think some of it all boils down to the absolute rage and feeling of disenfranchisement that that core group of 37% of the electorate that supports Trump no matter what feels. It now, in hindsight, is obvious that because of technological and economic changes that someone like Trump was inevitable. Someone was going to see an obvious political opportunity and strike. Little did we ever imagine that it would be a celebrity TV gameshow host who would do it. And with the help of the Russians, no less! But it happened.

That Russian interference is something that should give all patriots pause for thought. That American conservatives are so detached from the world I know and love, that they feel so disenfranchised that they would willingly ignore what is tantamount to treason on the part of the Trump campaign simply because they want to turn back the policies of the first African American president is pretty mind boggling. The only thing I can compare it to is Vichy France.

We need a national conversation between the rural Trump supporting world and the urban progressive world. We can’t just give up. If we give up we’re doomed. We’re doomed to a civil war. Any student of history will tall you that in the late 1850s, a similar dynamic was afoot in the American body politic as the industrial North with free labor grew increasingly distant from the slave based South.

I love America and I don’t want a civil war. So, that’s why myself and people like me who consider themselves center-Left have an obligation to try to engage Trumpists. We have to figure out how to engage them without compromising to such an extent that we give up everything we believe in. It’s extremely difficult, however.

The crux of the problem we face is just that. Technology has made is so easy to live in our own little bubble that that we aren’t forced to come up with arguments to use against people who disagree with us the most. Bac 30 years ago, we all had a common reality and could agree on the facts. Now, too often, at least with Trumpists, anything they don’t agree with is “fake news.”

When I’m feeling in a particularly bleak mood, I think a civil war is inevitable. It definitely seems that way right now. But if the right leadership arises maybe, just maybe, I’m wrong. We need leaders willing to unite us, not divide us. But it could be we’re doomed and we’ll look back at this era in our history as the precursor to a civil war or worse.

#Trump, A Reassessment: Mulling The Long Con #Resist

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

For about six months after Trump’s election, I was so angry that I seethed with rage. Now that I have calmed down considerably, I find myself struggling to understand why Trump won and what is continued appeal is for roughly 37% of the American electorate.

We have to understand that Trump is a product of social media. Something about the rise of social media has made people extremely partisan. Some of it has to do, I think, with how easy it is to block or otherwise avoid people who disagree with you. So, both sides simply wallow in an echo chamber of things they agree with, leading to the breakdown of the traditional basic need of democracy to have consensus, compromise and synthesis. Throw in dark money, gerrymandering and Russian meddling through bots and paid trolls and you have us where we are today.

And, yet, we have one significant thing to be thankful for: Trump has no political ideology. He has no strategy. He’s all about the tactical win. He’s all about winning the moment. If Trump had the rock-hard ideology of, say, Pat Buchanan, we would be in serious trouble indeed.

But, as it stands, there is no Trumpism without Trump. Whatever magical mystery power Trump has over a sizable chunk of the electorate is attached to him personally. So, really, the only way to get rid of Trumpism is to completely vanquish Trump personally as a political force. That is quite tricky because the American Republic is on such shaky legs for various reasons that the core problems that allowed the Trump caner to fester will remain for many years to come.

One issue is people like me are too quick to enrage and not engage Trump supporters because, well, we’re at a loss as to where to begin. Where do we begin to engage people who we feel support a racist, misogynist bigoted nativist? I struggle to do that for various reasons. I closest I can come is seeing that the blind rage of people in rural areas about the modern liberal order was so great in 2016 that they were willing to overlook any flaw on Trump’s part because they thought he would, in fact “drain the swamp.”

That’s the thing that I think people like me have the most difficulty understanding: that core group of people who support Trump really do support the authoritarian chaos that he has caused since he came to power. That’s what they wanted. It’s difficult for secular humanists like me understand why “values voters” could possibly support the thrice married Trump. But they do. They do because they know that while he’s using them for his own political needs, he will, in fact give them the reach around that they have longed for so desperately. He gives them a sense of power that they haven’t felt in decades, if ever. The fact that it’s all a gross political ploy doesn’t phase them.

Another thing people like me struggle to understand is that fact that rock hard core group of Trump supporters that aren’t going anywhere really do think a Hillary Clinton administration would have been worse. They actually, to this day, really think that. They may be a lot more quiet than they were election day night, but they still think it.

Which raises an interesting counter-factual. What if Clinton had won? What would the world look like a year after the election? Probably something like this: instead of Trump’s tweets causing chaos from the White House, they would incite the Republican Congress to look for any number of different reasons to impeach Clinton and they probably would have gotten pretty damn close.

But Trump won. So we have to deal with the consequences. One of the crucial unknowns is will things snap back into place once Trump finally leaves the public sphere, or are we doomed. Are we going to suffer a Russian-style autocracy from now on because of the damage that Trump has inflicted on our body politic, or will we go back to some semblance of normalcy once he’s gone?

The answer to this question lies, in great part, to who succeeds Trump. If it’s Mike Pence, probably things will be more likely to snap back into some semblance of being normal. However, if Trump manages to last a full term, or even get re-elected, all bets are off. It is possible, probably probable, that we’ve reached some sort of event horizon whereby the realms of celebrity and politics are so muddle that they are indistinguishable.

It may be that the person who manages to heal the divides caused by Trump — and they are many — won’t be a traditional politician at all, but a liberal celebrity who manages to bridge the gaping wound that Trump has caused in our national psyche. The longer Trump stays president, the more likely it will be, say a Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart who succeeds him. I like to think that the only person who stands up to the middle school bully is the middle school class clown and it would make a lot of sense if someone like them took up the challenge of bringing down Trumpism. Though of late I’ve begun to think that the only person who could handle the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune any Democrat would suffer at the hands of FOX News’ bullshit would be someone tough as nails like Chelsea Handler.

The most ominous aspect of all of this is it’s possible we’re doomed. It really is possible that the United States is now a failed state and the only thing keeping it together is Trump himself. It’s possible that Trumpists are so completely deluded and brainwashed by their bullshit bubble that once he’s no longer in power things will grow dire indeed. And that doesn’t even begin to address the possibility that someone really dangerous — a charismatic Right-wing nutjob with an ideology — may learn from the mistakes of Trump and inflict the final death blow to the American Republic. That we really may fall of the precipitous into a dystopia.

I would like to think I have some hope that that worse case scenario won’t happen, but I don’t. History doesn’t go in a straight line and there are absolutely no assurances that the good guys will win. All we can hope is that some sort of sanity will return to American political discussion sooner rather than later.

Shelton Bumgarner is a writer and photographer living in Richmond, Va. He can be reached at migukin (at) gmail.com.

Talk To Me Internet: #TrumpRussia #DPRK #GunControl #Podcasting

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Talk to Me Internet
In this one, I go into a kinds of things. I talk about #GunControl, #Trump, #AI, and #TrumpRussia. I also talk about a possible war with #NorthKorea and its consequences. I also talk about potentially #podcasting at some point in the near, near future

Talk To Me Internet: Of #Gab & #UraniumOne

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I am really concerned that something tragic is going to happen because of the insane Uranium One rhetoric coming out of places like Gab. It’s simply completely bonkers and there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s all leading us down a slippery slope that could endup with some truly horrible consequences that we can’t anticipate at this point.

‘Great, America’ — Proposed #SNL Skit

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Trump is always talking about “making America great again,” and I propose the following SNL skit. It would be set in a rural place of indeterminate location. The comedy would come from us trying to figure out when and where Great, America is.

It would be amusing to see as we struggle to figure out exactly when America was great and why.

Foresight Is 20/20 – The 2020 Election & Trump: Will Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart Save Us?

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I have to agree with Roger Stone that there is a real risk of political violence in the next four to eight years. I suspect what is going to happen is that 2020 will be the most consequential presidential election since 1860 and just as messy. I have a feeling that the two parties are going to split into four for similar reasons. The Trump base of the Republican Party will force the Romney establishment of the Republican Party out of the party altogether. Meanwhile, the Zuckerburg center-left of the Democratic Party will split from the progressive base of that party.

I still think that that someone like Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart will throw their hat into the ring change everything. But that’s just me daydreaming. The video below goes into great length about what I’m talking about.