This was the message I received when I clicked a link on a blog post written nearly ten years ago to a White House page talking about Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency. Same thing for the link to Teddy Roosevelt’s time in office. Abe, too. Not to mention FDR, LBJ, Carter and Obama. These motherfuckers are relentless and unhinged. Stupid, too. They are not republican in the slightest. Not even American. Just the worst kind of citizen freeloader. Claiming to be patriots while hating everything that makes America great. Irony sucks.
What these dipshit would-be dictators don’t understand is they can’t delete official government pages documenting our history as a nation and expect that data to simply disappear as if it never existed. They’ve likely never heard of the Wayback Machine that’s been archiving the Internet since 1996. They took a snapshot of the page I mentioned above on January 19, 2025. By January 22 it was gone along with a whole host of government sites and pages, starting with those highlighting the amazing achievements by everyone who isn’t a cis white male.
They’ve taken a similar jackboot approach to all aspects of the American experience and identity. Tearing through every norm that’s kept us heading in a generally progressive direction. That’s not to say we still don’t have massive societal problems created by republicans (and abetted by “moderate” democrats) since the 1970s, but the solution to that is and always has been in our hands as eligible voters who far too often fail to show up and vote. That’s exactly how we got to where we are with the current regime. I’m glad they aren’t smarter.
This crazy detour might be just the medicine we need while being able to survive with our rights intact. The federal vendetta against the most vulnerable in our society and the gutting of essential government services is testing what we believe to be true about ourselves as a people. The damage from these “policies” is already creating significant chaos and pain from coast to coast, in cities big and small. Red and blue districts alike. We’re all going to suffer, some far more than others, because we’ve all been damned for quite some time.
We The People have no choice but to shoulder the blame for the fucking memory hole we can’t seem to shake despite historically unprecedented access to information. We’ve been erasing our history in real time for as long as I’ve been alive. It remains our biggest challenge to finally evolving into the 21st century powerhouse we could still become. Across every measure we are failing as a nation. Death by a thousand strategic and tactical cuts published in dense treatises by rightwing thinktanks and slowly implemented by the GOP over decades.
Irony can be a blessing. The entire nefarious scheme these sociopathic assholes have foisted upon us is imminently vulnerable to the average citizen finding their voice. The process has begun in townhalls and protests nationwide as the reality of what we allowed to happen in 2024 comes into horrible focus. These clowns overplayed the hand they were dealt, furiously gaslighting the public and threatening harsh retribution for not falling into line. Forever the Achilles Heel of authoritarians in our complex form of representative government.
Unlike countries who traded their imperfect democracies for brutal dictatorships, we’re far too diverse and unruly to ever be truly subjugated by violence. We’re also armed to the teeth. Irony rears its lovely head again. The rightwing has been fighting gun regulation for years and let the assault weapons ban expire in 2014, providing a bulwark against true tyranny. It won’t stop them from pushing boundaries in other areas and targeting their perceived enemies with malicious intent. It won’t stop them from raiding the commons and public coffers.
It does give us time and motivation, though, which is all We The People need to fix things once and for all. I’ve been preaching about the primary elections since Obama was elected and lost the House in the 2010 midterms. He lost the Senate in 2014 not to mention state houses and legislatures across the country. The Tea Party’s hold over Congress and our national discourse was complete. It would metastasize two years later into the deadly pathogen we’ve been fighting ever since. The cure is simple. The 2026 midterm elections.
Voters can’t forget the assignment this time. We have one shot at stopping this fascist takeover in its tracks. I’m not a huge fan of the Democratic Party and the part they played in getting us to this place. We can shore up that weakness later by way of the afore mentioned primaries. Right now they are our primary weapon against losing everything we hold dear. If everyone who voted in 2024 shows up again in 2026 to protest this Nazi bullshit, the impact would be exponential. The rabid republican base would be totally overwhelmed.
The data is crystal clear. Small bumps in turnout for midterm elections leads to unexpected and dramatic shifts in our politics. So far, that societal weakness has mostly benefited the far right, but it’s a lever that can now be leveraged by a nation to save its collective asses from the horrors we face. We can spend the last two years of this nightmare undoing all the hideous shit they did by way of Congress flexing its substantial powers of oversight and impeachment. We The People taking to the streets as needed will provide the backbone.
Rinse and repeat until this country finally lives up to its stated ideals for all its citizens, not just those at the very top.