Archive for trump

On the “Progressive Problem”…

Posted in Grumblings with tags , , , , , on September 3, 2025 by chemiclord

So Chelsea Clinton is running for office.

Maybe.

Possibly.

At least, according to right wing rumor mills. But that rumor is all that left-leaning social media needed to get lost all up in their feelings, and reveal more about themselves than they realize.

Now, as far as Chelsea Clinton goes, I know next to nothing about her. I don’t know anything about her politics. I don’t know if she even has any intention of actually running for any office, much less Jerry Nadler’s seat in New York. I also don’t care. I wouldn’t care if she was running for office in Michigan (the state that I live in).

See, I’m not afraid of names. My view is that anyone who wants to run for office should run. If Chelsea Clinton has problematic politics (the fear of which seems based entirely on her last name than anything she has ever said), and the primary voters select her anyway, that tells me we have a problem with the electorate.

But I suppose I can be flippant about that because I already know that’s true. The electorate of the United States of America (and honestly pretty much anywhere) is filled with profoundly shitty people who hold extremely shitty views of the world around them. I also know that these people aren’t “brainwashed” or “manipulated” or “misled” or “distracted” or whatever. People aren’t empty vessels in which shitty content is poured into and mixed. Humans, in general, are broken in so many ways that it can be relatively easy to weaponize them for whatever cause you want.

And that is what has my fellow left-leaners scared. Deep down, despite all their bluster, they know they are a minority. They know damn well that they don’t represent more than a significant minority of the public no matter how much they claim that there are a legion of closet socialists just waiting for the right message. We just hate admitting it to ourselves, because that admission would require there is long-term work to be done, and if there is one thing the trust-fund babies who fuel the leftist and progressive themes on social media hate more than liberals… it’s work.

That’s the “Progressive Problem.” It has nothing to do with our message. It has nothing to do with the spats with “libtards” and “dirty centrists.” It’s that we don’t want to do the ground level work to make our minority a majority. It’s because then we’d have to accept there are, in fact, good faith criticisms of the model we propose. We’d have to acknowledge that things could go very wrong with our model, and actually do the fucking work to address those problems. We’d have to acknowledge that (gasp!) an all-or-nothing approach is a terrible approach to pretty much anything in life!

It would also require us to acknowledge that we fall victim to the exact same flaws of personality that we scoff at others for falling for, and that a cadre of very loud “fauxgressives” with bullhorns posting breathless screeds about Chelsea Clinton on BlueSky are probably really poor figureheads for any sort of political movement.

On the Epstein “Conspiracy…”

Posted in Grumblings with tags , , , , on July 12, 2025 by chemiclord

Maybe it’s just because I tend to be skeptical of conspiracies in general, but If I had to offer a loosely-educated guess, the “list” Epstein made basically had every interaction he had with anyone wealthy or powerful, and not necessarily clients.  The creep went out of his way to integrate himself with anyone with any meaningful influence, and I sincerely doubt all of them were interested in buying what he was selling… but it would make for excellent blackmail nonetheless.

I strongly suspect if the “Epstein List” had anything particularly salacious beyond what had already been leaked… someone clout-hunting would have leaked it.

As for the entire “Epstein was murdered” angle, I have yet to see anything particularly compelling about the evidence that can’t be explained by “shitty prison doing shitty prison things.”  Would I be surprised that a shitty prison doesn’t exactly have the best surveillance?  No.  Would it surprise me at all that they still use crappy equipment from the 90s?  Nope.  Would I be astonished that the guards wouldn’t exactly be invested in making sure a pedophile in their midst stayed among the living? Not at all. Am I surprised that Trump is trying to cover this all up because all of it makes him “look bad?”  Not in the slightest.

At the end of the day, I have to believe one of two scenarios.  Either a secret cabal of wealthy and powerful individuals who could have offed Epstein at any number of opportunities decided to choose the worst possible time when he was under the biggest microscope of his life to kill him and guarantee exactly the sort of scrutiny that they spent literally decades trying to avoid, going through an elaborate scheme that would inevitably involve people outside their cabal that had no particular reason to stay silent…

… Or a dude used to a billionaire’s lifestyle was looking at a lifetime in a shitty prison with all his allies, clients, and associates now pretending they never knew him, and decided to check out early while creating exactly the sort of chaos and scrutiny his clients sought to avoid.

I dunno, the most likely scenario seems pretty obvious to me.

How Democrats Win…

Posted in Grumblings with tags , , , , on June 26, 2025 by chemiclord

Perhaps not surprisingly, I have some thoughts on this.

On a purely straightforward, taking solely on its face sense… sure?  There is a lot of truth to this… but there’s also a lot of problems with this stance.

Something I like to say about Democrats is that we aren’t particularly a majority in a traditional political sense.  We are a majority of minority interests.  And yes, there is a degree that Democrats must have a very big tent to have the numbers in order to enact anything.  Yes, such a coalition is going to have a very broad swath of interests, and more than a handful are going to wind up mutually exclusive of others.

(See also: the Gaza and Israel conflict; even in completely good faith, that is a fault line in which what one side wants frequently requires you to outright dismiss the wants of the other.)

But…

There are some groups that some of our caucus want to bring in that have not been shy about what they want from the Democratic coalition, and frankly, what they want should be an utter dealbreaker, even if it means we don’t have the numbers to win elections.

Case in point, every time a politician says we need to court “the white working class?”  Fuck that shit.  The “white working class” hasn’t exactly been secret about what they want.  Sure, they make mouth noises about how they could accept “Democratic Socialism,” but you better not be giving anything to those “people who don’t deserve it,” ya know… like black people, or trans people, or gay people, or unmarried women, etc.

Or when a politician talks about “courting moderates.”  Yeah, we’ve already fucking done that.  The right flank of the Democratic Party are people who would be conservatives if it wasn’t for the outright vile bigotry and deplorable vileness of the current GOP.  Anybody worth poaching from the center right has already been fucking poached.  You’re looking at a rounding error number of voters at this point.

And there’s a degree that I get it. The nature of such a coalition is going to lead to most of us being largely unsatisfied with the end result of all the jockeying and pandering and compromise.  The problem is rather than accept that, a critical mass of us would rather embrace conspiracy theories and that a minority of the party has somehow managed to seize the levers and are using it solely for their gain at the expense of everyone else in the coalition.

And it’s not just “one side” that does this, either.  There is just as much centrist bellyaching when a “progressive” wins (just listen to some of the whining in the aftermath of this NYC mayoral primary… or how AOC deviously uprooted an establishment Dem by… (checks notes)… actually interacting with constituents of her district and earning their trust ) as there is when leftists insist that “centrist Dems” like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders twice with the nefarious scheme of… (checks notes)… getting millions more primary votes than Bernie Sanders.

A lot of the times when I hear talking heads mumble about “expanding the coalition” what I hear is, “I would rather waste my time looking for some mythical silent majority of secret socialists or secret liberals than try to work with the people already in the tent.”