Category: From The Editor

Cold Civil War:The Demise Of Blogging, & The Rise Of Trump In The Twitter Era

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

That a racist, bigoted, misogynist demagogue such as Donald Trump would become president in the wake of traditional blogging’s demise is an interesting and telling occurence. It raises some powerful questions for no other reason than we’re now in something of a Cold Civil War as America’s civil society struggles to understand what the fuck is going on.

For instance, when the president tweets, what is it? Is it “just social media” or is it an official statement from the President of the United States that should be treated as such. I lean hard on the latter. If the president writes it and it’s meant to be seen in public, then it’s an official statement.

But what’s interesting is Trump and his vile ideology prospers in a very narrow subset of social media. Twitter is kind of an interactive discussion between people’s bumper stickers. What’s even more interesting is you can, if you wish, block someone’s messages to you on Twitter.

The result of this is powerful. We come to expect that if we don’t like what someone is communicating to us, that we can eliminate that communication for good. That leads to a warping of the traditional communication cycle because people suddenly feel entitled to “safe spaces” because they’re afraid they’re going to get “triggered.” If they didn’t have the option of eliminating communication they didn’t like, maybe they would develop tougher skin and we wouldn’t be in half of the trouble we’re in currently.

Meanwhile, Twitter’s face pace and pithy style of communication has led to a Darwinian struggle of ideas. Instead of a marketplace of ideas, we have a jungle. Now only the strongest, more virulent strains of memes manage to grow in the Twitter jungle. There is a reason why we say a meme has gone “viral.”

So what does all of this mean in the context of Trump’s rise and the demise of blogging. Well, I am suggesting that if we still were talking about the once-powerful “blogsophere” that Donald Trump would not be president right now. Way back only a few years ago, before the rise of Twitter, you had the option of long, well thought out blogs that forced not only the reader but the writer to engage in something more than a bumper sticker’s wroth of communication. Instead of 140 characters, you had to wade through 500 or more words to fully process what was going on.

Is there any solution to all of this? Well, in my opinion, yes. I feel as though if Silicon Valley stopped being so obsessed with AR and VR long enough to revisit the issue of social media, maybe we might be able to dig ourselves out of this Cold Civil War. Silicon Valley made this problem, I feel it’s at least partially their responsibility to solve it.

I have gone into great depth on my Instagram account about how I, personally, would fix this problem but because I have no money, can’t code and don’t won’t to learn, I’m really just shouting out into the void. But let me briefly recap my concept. It’s very timely now, to say the least.

It seems to me that if you gave Verified Account holders a sense of stakeholdership in platform, then maybe they would generate better content and it would be less likely that celebrity trolls like Donald Trump would rise to prominence. So, I would give them the ability to create “Groups” in a service. The “Groups” would be given names devoted to any subject that a Verified account holder might feel their followers might find interesting. These “Groups” would be sub-divided into “Discussions.” These “Discussions” would be thread discussions made up of full pages posts about the topic of the “Group.” So, in a sense, you would kind of update the Usenet concept of 20 years ago. There are any number of concepts from that era that we’ve lost weirdly enough over the last few decades.

All of this would be even cooler if you had a newspaper chain like, say, Tronc, fund such a startup in the first place in an effort to self-disrupt the newspaper business. It’s a really intriguing concept to say the least.

The point of all of this would be that not only would it encourage better content, but given that the medium is the message, maybe if you had a full webpage to discuss a subject in the context of a threaded discussion, maybe it would be less likely that stupid, hateful, and loaded concepts like “Make America Great Again” would go viral and infect the body politic.

But, of course, none of this would happen in a vacuum. You’d have to design such a service from the ground up as something of a “Twitter Killer.” And it’s possible that Twitter isn’t going anywhere and all of this is pointless. Yet it is, at least, interesting to talk about.

I guess what I hope is if we somehow killed Twitter, provided a better, similar product that forced us to write in more than 140 characters, then then next adept politician who was adept at using social media might be a little less crazy. Of course, maybe I’m missing the bigger picture. It could be that we’re just going to have to wait until VR and AR get to the proper penetration in society before we have another shot at fixing the problems caused by existing social media. Or maybe social media video like Facebook Live or Periscope might be what we’re all talking about in four years during the next election cycle.

If we can’t kill Twitter, then it seems as though Twitter as a company has a responsibility to better handle its abuse by Russian-paid trolls and bots in four years. The Russians learned a valuable lesson in 2016, and they’re only going to come back worse and more determined in four years.

I just hope there’s something left in four years. There are no assurances that the Good Guys will win the Cold Civil War and it may still be raging yet in four or six or eight years.

Shelton Bumgarner is the Editor and Publisher of The Trumplandia Report. He can be reached at migukin (at) gmail.com. He is always looking for people to write for him, though he can’t, at this point, pay.

The New Normal Of Trumplandia: A Constitutional Amendment Is Needed

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

It seems pretty obvious that we need to stop raging against our loony, doofus of a president and settle for a long fight. This is not a sprint but rather a marathon and it should be treated as such. Donald Trump isn’t going anywhere and we need to realize he is going to do real damage to the country in the four to eight years he will be president.

Having said all that, how do we prevent something like Trump from happening again? It seems as we need an expansive, well thought out Constitutional Amendment directed at specifically fixing what we have learned about the problems in our presidential election system.

This proposed Constitutional Amendment would:

1. Overturn Citizens United
Only by managing the “dark money” associated with corporations being people can we begin to expect to have better candidates.

2. Tinker with the Electoral College
It is pretty much impossible to get rid of the Electoral College altogether because both parties have a vested interest in it continuing. But what if you said something like, if there was a problem with the voting on Election Day, that there was a mechanism to have a new election a few weeks later. That would mitigate, if not fix some of the issues we’ve had in recent years.

3. Lightly manage the First Amendment during the last days of an election
It wouldn’t take much, but maybe you could say access by people outside the American media would be lightly managed. Something to make it more difficult for Russians — or whomever — to screw with our otherwise free and fair elections.

It’s highly unlikely any of this would happen as I’ve suggested in previous posts, but it makes me feel better to vent about it.

Trumplandia As The Singularity’s Political ‘Event Horizon’

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

It seems very possible that the source of all the fear and “social anxiety” that has allowed an unstable racist, misogynist, bigot demagogue to rise to power in the United States might be laid at the feet of some sort of slow-moving technological singularity.

The reason why I suggest this is there must be some sort of reason for people being so afraid of the changes taking place in society. Those changes are happening so fast, in part, because of technology. So, maybe things are going to hell in a hand basket so quickly because, well, things are moving too fast for normal civil society to process it.

One could make the case that both Communism and Nazism came about by the fast pace of change that took place in the early 20ths Century. A lot happened technologically in the 1910-1940 period of time and since, say, about 1990 things have really begun to speed up again.

I have given it some thought, and the modern era really began with wide-spread adoption of the smartphone. And, really that’s the thing that allowed modern social media to take off. And this, of course, doesn’t even address the secondary effects of this slow moving technological Singularity that I suggest is taking place. I mean, self-driving semi-trucks haven’t hit the road yet, but we all know they’re coming.

Additionally, things like 3-D printing and nanotechnology will bring even more political change in the coming years. It isn’t too difficult for someone to wrap these technological changes up in an ideology and use them as a blunt force against the traditional post-war neo-liberal capitalist system.

The only thing that has saved us from that potentially destructive thing happening right now is Donald Trump and by extension Trumplandia doesn’t have an ideology.It’s just a rage against all change and it would make sense that the change it’s raging against is, in fact of a Singularity-like change.

So not only are people raging against the fast pace of social change caused by us approaching the Singularity, their rage, in a sense, is being channeled by the very technology that’s causing the trouble in the first place. Social media is not only causing great social change, it is also causing a Darwinian battle in the market place of ideas whereby only the strongest, most extreme ideas thrive.

Thus, the tribal politics that has infected American civil society could best be described as tech-tribal politics. In a way, one could say that while we’ve not reached the Singularity by any means, we have reached its Event Horizon. We’re now finally eternally locked in its gravitational field. Or put another way, we might, in a 100 years, look back and say the election of Donald Trump was the moment when the soon-to-come Singularity started to warp civil society in a demonstrative manner.

To go back to the issue of how this might be used in an ideological manner, it would make a lot of sense if today’s Trumplandia turned into something even more destructive, even more corrosive and even more dangerous to the world order. The barbaric populism and nationalism of Trumplandia might eventually evolve as we grow ever-closer to the Singularity into something more akin to technologically Maoism or Trotskyism. That these long-dead and horrible ideologies might pop back up is shocking to thin about, of course, but I doubt any of us have really given the political power of the Singularity a lot of thought.

We’re so busy daydreaming out how we’re going to upload our minds into computers and live forever, that we totally miss the idea that a demagogue like Donald Trump might lead a nation like the United States down a dark and scary path once the Even Horizon of the Singularity has been reached. You can tall about a Universal Basic Income all you like, but given the tribal politics of the United States, it’s highly unlikely to ever happen, even once automation and robotics take all the jobs.

That is, of course, when we all look at each other and ask, “Now what?”

Answer that question will be the biggest problem faced by modern liberal democracies in the years and decades to come. There just isn’t an easy answer and into that void someone like Trump — or hell, even Trump himself given how fast things are moving now — will come crashing in and lead us all into a dark, scary time not seen since the 1930s.

Interestingly enough, once this process is over, the very idea of the nation-state may fade and the world will be divided into ethno-spheres. But the process of cracking the existing order to do that might involve huge numbers of people dying.

Hopefully the process will be significantly less destructive than what brought about today’s existing order, but there are no assurances. Trumplandia has sped up our political hurdling towards the technological Singularity and we all have to be prepared for the shake up that is to come.

We live in extraordinary times and Trump isn’t going anywhere. By the time the system finally gets unglued, no sooner than two years from now, some truly momentous things may have happened. Weirdly enough, for a movement build on rejecting the fast pace of change during the Obama years, Trumplandia itself is now set to really shaking things up in a manner that may take decades for us to process.

Shelton Bumgarner is the editor and publisher of The Trumplandia Report. He may be reached at migukin (at) gmail.com.

Vichy Republicans & The Fall Of The American Republic

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Someone said on Twitter that it felt like Trumplandia was “cratering” tonight. I would strongly say the opposite. Because of the callow, craven nature of the Vichy Republicans that have essentially given absolute control to Donald J. Trump, things are only going to get worse for the foreseeable future.

Only if something really, really telling happen, like a Jeremy Corbyn win in Great Britain would I sit back, rub my beard and mull the possibility that maybe that things have gone to far. Something like that would give me some hope that maybe the pendulum is swinging back toward some form of sanity. I say that as someone who fears if Corbyn won you’d have to que the Benny Hill music when it comes to British politics. It’d be kind of nuts, if fun, if it happened.

Sorry for the noise in the background on this one.

Regardless, domestically, at least we can only take solace in the fact that it appears as though Trump has lost Twitter. Or, maybe, the Russian hackers that manipulated Twitter aren’t getting paid anymore so they’ve moved on. It used to be that you couldn’t have an actual serious conversation about Trump without whack jobs popping out of the woodwork all but demanding you bow down before Trump as Lord Zood. But that has changed in a weird way. It’s the silence that’s really weird. Trump hasn’t lost Periscope yet, so I guess he has that to be thankful for. Periscope users are still completely nuts.

I continue to be really unhappy with where things are going with Trumplandia. The Vichy Republicans are to blame for this and nothing is going to change as long as they’re in power. So, we’re stuck with Trump for a solid 18 months, at least, and that doesn’t even begin to factor in the errant power grab on his part caused by a major crisis that may happen with, or without, his approval and goading.

The Vichy Republicans are allowing Trump to sow division both at home and abroad. They are completely complicit n all of this and I pretty much think we’re on track for the fall of the American Republic. By that, I mean, like the frog in the slowly boiling pot, we may very well wake up one day soon and some pretty basic right will be gone. I don’t know how exactly it will all happen, but it will happen.

Why am I so sure? Well, the silence on the part of the Vichy Republicans is so loud and the cancer on the American body politic that is Trumplandia seems to be metastasizing so quickly that what other inevitability could there possibly be? Not to sound too much like a Debby Downer, but I really need some hope. I need something to latch on to — like a Corbyn win — to give me some indication that there will be a happy end to this dark period.

I place all our problems at the feet of the Vichy Republicans. If they would put country over party, then the system of Constitutional checks and balances put in place by the Founding Fathers would actually, like, work and stuff. But as it stands, we have a tyrannical, would-be autocratic madman at the center of the nation’s political universe. What’s worse, he keeps alienating everyone but is base through erratic tweets, pulling out of important international agreements, and generally being a monumental dick.

But because the Vichy Republicans are addicted to power above all else, and the Republican base that elected Trump and continues to support him has absolute sway over them politically, there is nothing that might induce them to have anything resembling a backbone. It’s just not going to happen until they’re kicked out of office. I’d like to think that a Blue Wave of The Resistance might do the trick, but may be deluding myself. Given that people are dropping out of Congressional races due to death threats, that pot may be a lot closer to boiling than
I would like to admit.

Really, it seems as though if power is the only thing that the Vichy Republicans care about, then the only time they may get a backbone is about a year from now should it appear as though they are going to lose “bigly” in the 2018 mid-terms. If that doesn’t seem to be the case, they won’t say a peep. But if things take a dramatic turn for the worse between now and, say, July 2018, there might, just might, be an unprecedented series of events where by the Vichy Republicans finally grow a pair and demand some accountability from the Trump Administration.

Even more interesting, as I have mentioned before elsewhere, if the Vichy Republicans lose Congress in November 2018, there might be a battle during the lame duck session of Congress between Republicans and Democrats to see who gets to impeach Trump first. The reason being, the Republicans would want the right to approve now President Mike Pence’s replacement.

And that doesn’t even begin to address my true nightmare scenario for 2019 whereby Trump would simply pardon everyone involved in Tsar-a-Largo — including himself — and hold up on the White House with the nuclear codes and dare anyone to come after him. A shoot out between the Secret Service and FBI on the White House lawn would be, uh, unique from a historical standpoint.

I guess all of this comes back to the point that we shouldn’t assume history goes in a straight line. We could very well be at the end of the road for the American Republic as we have conceived of it for about 240 years now. This could be it. The end. We could be, from now on, a semi-autocratic quasi-religious imperial system with only the assurance of an open presidential seat every eight years being our last foot hold to our republican past.

It pains me to suggest such a thing, but we can’t delude ourselves into thinking the Vichy Republicans will ever grow a backbone. We could be stuck with Trumplandia for four or eight more years and then we really would need someone to make America great again.

All I can say is what I’ve been saying — stay engaged. Don’t rage, engage is the catch phrase I’ve come up with. It’s a pithy explanation for my personal vision for how we dig ourselves out of this hole. There are no easy answers when it comes to Trumplandia.

We just have to have hope that the American spirit is stronger than a despot who would aim to inflict a “managed democracy” on us from above. Don’t take anything for granted, folks. This party has just begun.

Shelton Bumgarner is the editor and publisher of The Trumplandia Report. He may be reached at migukin (at) gmail.com.

Don’t Rage, Engage: Who Are The People Of Trumplandia?

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

As I have mentioned before, I am looking for to help me write this blog.I have very low expectations for various reasons and at this point, I don’t even know how much longer I will find the energy to continue such a seemingly meaningless exercise.

But this blog still a little bit fun despite virtually no one reading it, and I posted to Craig’s List recently, hoping to find someone willing to write for free while I grew the product. Well, all I can say is apparently only Trump supporters are willing to write for free.

Everyone who has answered my call for writers have in very eager, earnest ways explained that they’re only interested in attacking, well, people like me. I feel like shooting off an email telling them, “You’re everything wrong with America right now,” but that wouldn’t be cool and would only make things worse.

So, I am quiet.

But it does make me a little bit uneasy. It reminds me that just because all the people I follow on Twitter agree with me, doesn’t mean there is any universal consensus about Donald Trump. In fact, it’s abundantly clear that Trumplandia is a live and well.

There continue to be a surprisingly large number of people who really support Trump to this day and they are eager to say so. People like me got burned during the 2016 campaign cycle by bots and paid trolls, so we have come to assume that anyone who disagrees with us is one of those two options.

Yet, obviously, that is not the case. Obviously, there are, in fact, actual live human beings who continue to support Trump despite everything. Despite all the cold hard facts that would seemingly make it impossible for any right minded person to continue to support Trump, there are, in fact, people who do.

This is the point where I scratch my head and don’t know what to say. We have reached a level of polarization in the United States body politic, a level of tribal politics that I can’t even grasp the logic behind someone supporting Trump. It’s gotten to the point where I can’t empathize with a Trump supporter because I can’t grasp their world view in all its surreal glory.

Given that civil discourse in a liberal democracy requires that the center-Left and the center-Right be able to talk to each other at least to the extent necessary to come to some sort of synthesis, some sort of compromise, this is a dangerous realization. If a person like me — who strives to attain some sort of understanding of people I disagree with can’t understand the reasoning of people on the other end of the political spectrum, we’re all completely fucked.

And, really, that’s where Donald Trump gets his power. You can tell me all you want to about how mean liberals like me cause “Trump curious” people decide to throw their lot with Trump completely, but the people of Trumplandia have to, at some point, take responsibility for this problem as well. It would be a lot easier for me if Trumplandia people would, like, chill out and at least attempt to form an opinion based in fact, not some sort of guttural opposition to progress.

But it doesn’t seem like this is going to happen anytime soon. Trump isn’t going anywhere anytime soon and the sooner people like me understand that, the better. It’s going to be tough, though. People like me too easily assume Trump will quit or be impeached and convicted and all of this will go away like a bad nightmare.

That, sadly, isn’t going to happen. This is a nightmare that we can’t shake. I wish there was an easy answer to these problems that we face, these difference of opinions that divide The Resistance from Trumplandia, but that is just not going to happen anytime soon.

We’re going to have to find a way to meet the residents of Trumplandia halfway. Only by doing that will we be able to mitigate the tribal politics that give Trump his power. If we don’t crack this nut soon, we may wake up eight years from now with Trump doing a victory tour and someone even worse than Trump by his side, accepting the Republican nomination.

If that doesn’t clear the mind, I don’t know what will.

Shelton Bumgarner is the Editor and Publisher of The Trumplandia Report. He is always looking for new writers. He can’t pay, but you’ll get experience. He may be reached at migukin (at) gmail.com.

Don’t Rage, Engage: Hollywood, Do Your Fucking Job

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

The whole Kathy Griffin kerfuffle is yet another reminder that Hollywood has been oddly silent about Donald Trump in the way that matters most: actually producing content that helps civil society process what the fuck is going on. That’s the whole point of Hollywood.

Currently comedy on TV has been picking up the slack for Hollywood. Be it Full Frontal, or Saturday Night Live or The Late Show, late night comedy is where right minded people go in America to try to figure out how to understand this horrific dead-end that we’ve found ourselves in.

Both a market and an audience exists for movies and TV devoted to being metaphors for Trumplandia. I know I would shell out $11 to see a movie that addressed what a fuckwit Donald Trump is. Or maybe a remake of 1984. Or a remake of Being There. Hell, even a movie about The Mule portion of The Foundation Saga would make me feel better at this point. This is pretty basic stuff. If me, a hayseed rube in a flyover state can figure this out, then I’m sure someone at Miramax or Paramount can figure something so basic out.

But what do we have right now instead of quality content? We have silence. I have not heard of hardly any films in production and there are only a spattering of TV that are obvious meant to direction address Trumplandia. It makes you wonder why this is.

You would think that something as momentous as the rise of Trumplandia would inspire the Hollywood scribes and producers to generate all kinds of content. But all we get is Kathy Griffin pretending to cut off Donald Trump’s head. Everyone would be served if she were to not rage against Trumplandia in such a stupid manner but rather write a TV script for a sitcom about dealing with Trumplandia. Something, anything to bring people together, instead of dividing them.

The only thing I can think of is that producers are skittish about offending people, by, well, losing money. In other words, stars feel obliged to be offensive on a personal level, but the people with money who maybe oppose Trump aren’t willing to take the risk that Trumplandia will freak out if you produced a movie that obviously attacked Trump in some direct manner.

That’s the only thing I can think of. That makes the most sense. There might be something to the fact that Hollywood is still in shock that Trump won in the first place and they just haven’t gotten over the shock enough to begin writing scripts that directly tough that live wire.

But I think it’s the money situation. Corporate types think differently that the artists they support, so that reluctance to lose money by offending the ever-so-touchy Trumplandia base probably is the reason. As someone pointed out to me recently, Watergate really only produced one movie and that was after it was over. So maybe it makes a lot more sense that I realize for there to be no movies about Trumpandia produce while it actually exists. And, really, if you think about it, it took decades before there was a movie that dealt with the Vietnam war directly, though Apocalypse Now was produced a few years after the fact. The closest to a TV show about Vietnam was that occured while it happened was M*A*S*H.

And, yet, Trumplandia is a significantly more weighty event than Watergate. Trumplandia, at least to me, seems ripe for a great movie or TV shows right now. We live in a different era than the 1960s and 1970 and I think audiences would flock to see a movie about a Trump-like character. I keep thinking of The Mule from The Foundation Saga, but it’s possible that because of Star Wars stealing so much from that series that that isn’t really applicable anymore.

Regardless, it would be sad if we had to wait 20 years before Hollywood addressed in metaphor Trumplandia. I really don’t want to have to keep seeing liberal Hollywood actors destroying their careers by raging against Trumplandia in a stupid way. Don’t rage, engage.

Shelton Bumgarner is the editor and publiser of the Trumplandia Report. He may be reached at migukin (at) gmail.com.

Will Labour Rise Again?

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

The only reason why I address British politics — something I honestly don’t know that much about — is it definitely has an interesting dynamic in the context of Trumplandia. It appears as though, from what I can discern from a little light reading on the subject that it is within at least the realm of possibility that Labour might win.

I don’t know enough about this subject right this second to give you an intelligent explanation of what it would mean for Great Britain should Labour win, but I guess the point of this post is to tell you I’m monitoring the situation.

As I understand it, to put things in perspective, if Labour won at this point, it would be kind of like Mondale winning in 1984. It would really shake things up in British politics and it would be a return to the more traditional democratic socialist views of Labour’s past.

Apparently, one outcome is a hung parliament. It just seems as though in this age of Trumplandia that the most outlandish things are happening on a regular basis. I don’t know what to say. I am going to try to bone up on this subject had have a better understanding of what’s going on by the time the actual election happens.

Stay tuned.

Don’t Rage, Engage: Trumplandia, Tribal Politics & Misogyny

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Today, I have been reminded twice there are two Americas right now and they hate each other. There is The Resistance, which is found largely on Twitter and moves at light speed when it comes to observing the latest Trump catastrophe and Trumplandia.

Trumplandia is a mythical, surreal land closed off from any rational thought and the electoral victory of Donald Trump is constantly relitigated and rehashed.

Being an ardent member of The Resistance, I sometimes find myself making some conclusions about other people that obviously I shouldn’t be making. Two events today reminded me that the United States is in deep trouble politically and things aren’t going to get any better any time soon.

For instance, I put out a call for writers on Craig’s List on a lark hoping I might find someone, somewhere who would be willing to work for free — at least for the time being — to help me build this site. My lone response so far, is this:

I will help you write about Hilary Clinton in a snarky manner.

I know Trump is an unpolished goof but I will take him to the alternative.

If you want insight into how grave things are in America, look at that quoted text. The entire post World War II global liberal order is quickly becoming a dumpster fire and the only critisim of Trump I can get out of this guy is Trump’s an “unpolished goof.” I find this staggering. This just blows my ever living fucking mind.

And, yet, I have to reflect on this mind set. I can’t just rage about it. I have to at least attempt to engage in some sort of understanding of the mindset that would cause such a comment. This bring me to the other interesting thing that happened today. I shoot out all the posts I write here to Twitter. In one of today’s headlines I asked why everyone hates liberals. Someone on Twitter saw this and wrote, “They’re losers and anti-American.”

Whoa buddy.

So, when we write the obituary of the America Republic, we’re going to have to address how it is that not only is the misogyny against Hillary Clinton such that people were totally blinded to her obvious experience, skill and ability, but also that the FOX News echo chamber made Trumplandia so apoplectic in its rage that people had reached the point where they hated liberals without any rational. They hated them because they hated them.

I am not a huge Hillary Clinton fan. I thought she was a weak candidate and probably should have been indicted because no person is above the law. But she wasn’t and when given the opportunity between what I saw as the potential of her steady hand and that of, um, a “unpolished goof” I had no qualms about voting for her. But she lost. And now we have to deal with the consquences.

But the weird thing about Trumplandia is they totally don’t realize they won. They don’t realize that when you’re in power anything that goes wrong is your fault. It all kind of blows my mind. What is the origin of their hatred for modern norms? How is it that they would see the person I see as a racist, bigoted, misogynist demagogue as simply an “unpolished goof.” How can the residents of Trumplandia be seeing what I see and come up with such dramatically different conclusions?

That is the crux of the crisis we’re currently in. And it’s not going anywhere.

If The Resistance is going to make any headway in the coming years, we’re going to have to understand exactly why Hillary Clinton lost. The process of doing that will probably rip the Democratic Party in two for at least one major election cycle as the progressives and the business friendly Wall Street liberals duke it out to see if Bernie or Hillary’s vision of the Democratic Party will be implemented. It is very likely that the Democratic Party will see the loss of Hillary Clinton as a sign that it should nominate a progressive like Sen. Al Franken in 2020.

Yet, at least in my opinion, a large part of Clinton’s defeat can be laid at the feat of misogyny. I think America choked. We had had the first African American president and the center-Right is still racist as fuck and they turned around and saw the prospect of a woman president and they just couldn’t handle it. That doesn’t even begin to address the general hatred of the Clinton family that, in itself, was a large factor in how passionate the Republican base was in 2016.

Meanwhile, much of that surreal world view comes from a general hatred of liberals. That one, too, kind of eludes me. It is obvious that eight years of “No Drama Obama” along with the rise of bubble inducing things like FOX News and Twitter caused the liberals to think there was some sort of assumption of slow, steady progress when in fact there far from that in some quarters.

This is what the Russians were able to so skillfully take advantage of during the 2016 election. The Republican Party had become so full of rage against the liberal mindset that they would rather vote for a quisling than vote for someone who was of the opposing party. And that doesn’t even begin to address what exactly the hold Trump had over primary voters was. That one still leaves me puzzled.

So where does this all leave us?

As I keep saying, if you’re not a member of Trumplandia, if you still care about America in the traditional sense, you’re going to have to put your outrage aside and engage instead. This is really tough. I don’t mean you have to give up what you believe. Far from it. But instead of just randomly being angry all the time, see this as an opportunity to engaged, to be excited and energized

See it as a chance to use your rights as a citizen in an effective manner. Trumplandia in all its delusional, surreal love of Donald Trump can take a lot away from us through gross malfeasance and gradual attacks on our liberties, but they can’t take the American spirit away from us.

Americans aren’t Russians. We’ve got spunk. We can do this. At least, that’s my hope. That’s all I got right now, is hope.

Shelton Bumgarner is the editor and publisher of The Trumplandia Report. He may be reached at migukin (at) gmail.com.

From The Editor: A Call For Writers

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

About once a year, I start a new blog and have all these grand visions of how I’m going to make it a success and then within about a month I get tired of it and that’s, that. So, with that in mind, let me do it again.

I can’t pay, so no one is going to listen to me, but should someone actually be interesting, I do have a lot of publishing experience and I promise you’ll have a good time. I’m looking for someone, anyone, to help me build this Website into a site that would kind of be the anti-Axios.

Axios does access journalism with the Trump Administration and my vision for this site is it would be like the old Gawker. It would be snarky and fun and analyze the minutia of the Trump Administration in a compelling manner.

But, like I said, I can’t pay. So I don’t expect anyone to take me up on this offer. I just thought I’d ask, regardless, just to see if there was a chance, however small, that someone might take me up on the offer.

You can reach me at migukin (at) gmail.com.

From The Publisher: Thanks, Twitter, For Screwing Me Over

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Now, the fact that Twitter is making it more difficult for me to market this site by DMing people on Twitter is probably good for the service in general, but it definitely makes my efforts at building this site a lot more difficult.

I have a pretty good vision for this site, but I simply don’t have the resources to do anything with it to the extent that maybe I otherwise would. I just don’t have the money. There is definitely an audience and a market for what I propose with this site, but the strategy I imagined originally — marketing the site to “thought leaders” on Twitter is now moot.

And, again, while it makes a sense for Twitter to impliment this feature, in a way some of the charm of Twitter is gone. It was fun to think that you might, just might, be able to talk to a powerful person in a direct way using Twitter and those days are now, sadly, over.

I guess it was inevitable that this would happen, but that’s life.