Archive: Year: 2022

It’s time for advocates of gun control to try the strategy that powered the civil rights movement: mass nonviolent civil disobedienceTeens For Gun Reform, an organization created by students in the Washington DC area, in the wake of the February 14, 2018 Parkland shooting (Photo by Lorie Shaull)Fear powers the gun lobby, one of the most powerful forces in our politics today. Even though a majority of Americans favor tougher gun laws, like universal background checks, waiting periods, and bans on assault rifles, a very well-organized minority has more power. Remember, organized minorities beat disorganized majorities all the time.Fear is what leads many Americans to buy guns in the first place. Even as crime rates have dropped from much higher levels...

Veteran NYTimes Columnist Laments the Rise of Trump’s Big Lie, Then Blames the Far Left For ItThomas L. Friedman at the World Economic Forum, Davos, 2013 (Photo by Michael Wuertemberg)Thomas L. Friedman invited me for lunch at his office at The New York Times Washington bureau last week. It was all off the record, so I can’t tell you anything he said.I can, though, tell you two things — what I ate and how I felt after. I ate a turkey sandwich with lettuce and tomato on whole wheat bread, with a bowl of strawberries and a chocolate-vanilla milkshake for dessert that was so good I needed to take a nap after lunch.What I felt afterward was this: For all you trolls on...

Self-described free speech advocates like Elon Musk have been conspicuously silentElon Musk has been vocal on a number of political issues lately but quiet on the massacre in Buffalo, where a Tesla factory is based. Photo by PHILIP PACHECO/AFP via Getty ImagesBack in January, I wrote a piece here about the first anniversary of the January 6th attack focusing on the conspicuous silence of a wide range of tech leaders and VCs, people who pride themselves on how innovative they are, how they’re making the world a better place, yadda yadda. It’s now been nearly a week since a young white racist drove himself to a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo and then entered a supermarket, deliberately shooting at people and...

What NY’s Democratic Redistricting SNAFU Has Revealed For All To SeeSean Patrick Maloney speaking at a party unity rally in 2012 after winning his first congressional primary (photo by Daniel Case)According to the New York Times, just two weeks ago, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY) told his fellow House Democrats in a private meeting that if the new congressional maps that the New York state legislature had just approved under redistricting were thrown out by the state’s highest court, it would be an “extinction-level event” for the party.Reading this made me spit out my coffee. First, because of the self-absorption the quote displays. We as a world are facing a slow-motion extinction-level event due to climate change; what individual Democratic politicians are...

And how politicians from Abraham Lincoln to Katie Porter manage(d) to be differentRep. Katie Porter (D-CA) said something important this week. “Too often, Congress recognizes issues too late,” she told Sarah Ferris of Politico after giving an emotional speech to her fellow Democratic House members about how inflation was affecting her family. Porter is a single mother of three who commutes back and forth from California to DC every week, and despite her congressional salary she’s feeling the pinch. She added, referring to inflation worries, “I had a colleague mention to me, ‘We’re not seeing it in the polls’ … Well, you don’t know what to ask,” she replied.“We’re not seeing it in the polls.” The fact that most Members of...

Until the Left invests in local orgs that matter in people’s daily lives and scaling that up, it’s likely to keep losing to the RightRally against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh outside the Supreme Court, Washington DC, 2018Amid the deluge of reporting and commentary on the leak of the Supreme Court’s pending ruling overturning the right to abortion, one number grabbed my attention. The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), which started in 1968 as a group of Catholic bishops opposed to state abortion laws, now says it oversees more than 3,000 local chapters under 50 state affiliates. “We’ve been working towards this goal for many years,” says Carol Tobias, its president.How many advocacy organizations in America claim to have 3,000 local...

The rightwing billionaire’s SuperPAC has been using this site to give J.D. Vance millions in campaign help.Screenshot from https://medium.com/@protectohiovaluesformsOn Tuesday night, just after the polls closed in Ohio, Alex Isenstadt of Politico published a story with a fascinating headline: “A mole hunt, a secret website and Peter Thiel’s big risk: How J.D. Vance won his primary.” Vance, the best-selling author of Hillbilly Elegy, was once a Trump critic, but since leaping into the political arena he’s become one of the ex-president’s biggest fans, earning his endorsement late in the race. But his victory Tuesday wasn’t just a sign that Trump and Trumpism is still dominant among Republican voters; it was also a major vindication for rightwing tech VC Thiel, who poured...

The Fox Network star is a ratings crack-head, pandering to minute-by-minute data on his audience’s basest fears.In April 2017, Tucker Carlson’s star at Fox News rose to the top slot, the covered 8:00pm prime time hour that had just been vacated by Bill O’Reilly. He had one challenge: how to build a loyal audience while distinguishing himself from fellow host Sean Hannity, then the network’s biggest ratings draw, who was slavishly pro-Trump. Carlson told friends and co-workers he needed a way to connect with the Trump faithful, but without constantly apologizing for the president’s foibles, something he feared would happen often. As The New York Times Nicholas Confessore recounts in meticulous detail in a just-published three-part series, Carlson quickly figured out...

As the midterms approach and voters sour on the party in power, here’s an alternative path worth trying.A month ago in this space, I offered some arguments for optimism about the upcoming mid-term elections for the majority of Americans who don’t want to see Trump Republicans return to power. Voter turnout has jumped dramatically since 2016, and the voters who surged in to vote in 2018 and 2020 tilted more blue than red, meaning there are plenty of potential Democratic voters out there. Current events like the Ukraine war also still offer the possibility of scrambling voter leanings. And finally the demographic and geographic shifts caused by the pandemic and more white collar professionals taking advantage of work-from-home options to move...

The world’s richest man could use Twitter to radically disrupt politicsTen years ago, Google did something unprecedented for a giant tech company. It blacked out the landing page for search and replaced it with a call to action, urging people to email their elected representatives in Congress to stop legislation that Google feared would break the internet. It was part of a much bigger day of action against the Stop Online Privacy Act and the Protect IP Act (SOPA/PIPA) that thousands of websites and organizations participated in, which ultimately resulted in an estimated 15 million calls, faxes and emails that melted down Congressional offices on both sides of the aisle and led to the quick withdrawal of the flawed legislation. Google...