Last Tuesday, nearly a year into Donald Trump’s second term, voters turned out in droves to express their opposition to his agenda. In multiple states Republicans faced political punishment for months of destruction, abuse, and discrimination. Glimmers of hope that were suppressed on Election Day 2024 began to emerge.

And in less than a week, Senate Democrats killed all the hope. There is a very clear propaganda campaign in effect right now to portray the cadre of 8 Democrats helping Republicans to reopen the government and cut health care as a rogue group. Don’t fall for it. This is an operation engineered by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who over the years has shown himself to be the Republican Party’s best partner and voter suppression agent in the Senate.

In wrestling the Montreal Screwjob is a famous infamous moment, when WWE owner Vince McMahon suddenly stripped away the title from Bret “Hitman” Hart during a match where Hart had been told he would win. Schumer keeps doing the same to Democratic voters.

Senate Democrats have over the years shown themselves to be some of the least adept practitioners of basic politics, and their default is almost always to screw over the public. They will cave at nearly the first Republican sign of resistance. They vote over and over again to confirm thoroughly unqualified Republican nominees, and the best they can ever offer is theatrical opposition – making grandiose but procedurally ineffective floor speeches while humbly voting to proceed on the GOP agenda.

Voters don’t like what Trump and Republicans are doing to America, but the Democrats seem deadest on helping them anyways. Schumer is in love with a conservative approach, a way of looking at the world that always prioritizes rocking the boat as little as possible while giving off the aroma of progress. I don’t think this can hold and it certainly shouldn’t.

Democratic leadership thrives on the (very real) fear their voters have for conservatism. The successful calculus they’ve used for years to keep those voters in line is the threat that not showing up to vote for Democrats, no matter the level of disappointment, is worse than empowering the GOP agenda.

But the display we’ve just seen (along with many others) tells voters that even when they turn up to oppose the GOP, the Democrats will just vote to pass the Republican agenda anyway. Telling someone in this clear of a voice that their votes simply do not matter is a level of voter suppression that ranks up there with armed poll watchers.

“The Republicans are worse” has never been a very good rallying cry but it embodies the inherent weakness of the Democratic Party. Candidates who have adopted the mantra that better things are possible and that Democrats don’t have to exist just as a counter to GOP action but who represent new ideas themselves, have been successful. We find ourselves at a new crossroads.

Schumer and the old way of thinking have never worked but faced with Trump’s pivot to extreme fascism and the Republican Party’s embrace of it, his style is actively destructive. The party is at a breaking point, and it is completely the fault of the establishment leadership.

It’s past time to break them or else our hope will completely fade away.

If you like this newsletter, please consider becoming a paying subscriber by clicking here to join. I won’t be putting any of my regular columns behind a paywall and they will always be free. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed so far!

— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on BlueSky @owillis.bsky.social

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Kal’s default mode is “pretty happy.”

There’s a very important scene in James Gunn’s “Superman” where Lois Lane quizzes Superman in an interview about his decision to weigh in and protect the citizens of Jarhanpur (a poor country) against the aggression of its neighbor Boravia (a U.S.-backed dictatorship).

Lois agrees with Superman, but she wants him to understand how his decision can be spun in the court of public opinion. She points out that his actions are seen as representative of U.S. foreign policy and that many hold suspicions about him because he has the powers of a literal god. This unnerves Superman, who grows increasingly frustrated because the machinations of modern media and politics are so antithetical to the way he sees the world. Ultimately, he gets very angry and screams at Lois, “PEOPLE WERE GOING TO DIE!”

Mild spoilers but by the end of the film it becomes clear that Superman absolutely did the right thing, and his choice to do what he did works as a catalyst to push other more powerful people to do what they can to make the world a better place.

Which leads me to the modern Democratic Party. For decades now the party has been trying to please everyone under the sun. It has become consensus within the party and liberalism at large, that rules and procedures must be followed and by doing so, the party and its affiliated ideological movement will have maximum legitimacy – leading to more good things and a better future. Donald Trump’s time in the presidency seems to validate this approach, because Trump is a bigoted fascist who doesn’t believe in rules and procedure, so the restoration of norms has become a rallying cry for Democrats opposing Trump.

The problem is that rules and procedure play a big role in how things got so bad in the first place. Trump, Republicans and the conservative movement didn’t get to the pinnacle of power out of nowhere. They worked the system, via the media and modern politics, ignoring tradition and barely holding on to the rules (totally obliterating them in some instances). Trump’s second term has especially eschewed the rules, and he has put a sledgehammer to the American way of life.

In contrast, by clutching the rules and procedures so tightly throughout all this, the Democrats have exuded impotence. And again, this isn’t new. We have seen Democrats roll over for the Reagan revolution, the Gingrich insurgency, and George W. Bush’s deployment of fascism lite, among many other episodes. The Democratic Party’s unwillingness to fight – and then its unwillingness to pursue justice once it has fallen backwards into power – has become an unfortunate default position in American politics.

That inability to have a pulse does nearly as much to suppress the vote as conservative voter suppression schemes. When the Democrats aren’t led by a charismatic wunderkind like Barack Obama or Bill Clinton or they don’t have a very clear hate object like Bush Jr. or Trump, the party limps along like a wounded animal – barely opposing anything let alone defeating clear evil.

What Democrats and liberals need to understand, as Superman did, is that sometimes the rules are dumb. Sometimes, the procedures and methods that we relied upon in the past are not adequate for modern times. If people are going to die or be hurt, they need to act.

Just get it done. Find a way. Use creative interpretations of the rules and laws. Get right up to the line if that means, ultimately, that people are going to benefit. People are tired of hearing that great things cannot be done because of arcane Senate procedures that nobody truly understands. People are so over hearing about appeals to decorum and comity that have long outlived their usefulness.

The opposition is filled with cruel villains who wouldn’t blink twice in accepting a course of action designed to do maximum harm, so why would the people who are purportedly fighting for good allow themselves to be hamstrung by something as insipid as tradition?

They shouldn’t. Liberalism needs to be a fighting liberalism, not a legion of status quo defenders. Defending how things “ought” to be or excusing inaction because it runs up against “norms” inspires nobody.

American society is facing its biggest threat since the Civil War. There is no point in preserving the way things were and sticking to the rules if we’re just going to end up in a repeat of this very bad place.

People were going to die – so do whatever is possible to prevent that, even if it makes people upset. The worst that could happen is too many people have a better life, too many people live longer, too many people have an overabundance of love and hope in their lives.

That is liberal excess I’m willing to live with. In fact, I think its Super.

If you like this newsletter, please consider becoming a paying subscriber by clicking here to join. I won’t be putting any of my regular columns behind a paywall and they will always be free. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed so far!

— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on BlueSky @owillis.bsky.social

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Went into the archives for some vintage Kal from 2019 when he was still a puppy and a little more gangly.

For the second time in eight months of his presidency, Donald Trump has deployed federal military force to subdue a city with a large Black population currently led by a Black woman. Los Angeles is led by Mayor Karen Bass and Washington, D.C. is led by Mayor Muriel Bowser, and Trump is a racist.

Trump is a racist who cannot help himself from immediately attacking any woman of color voicing dissent as having a “low I.Q.” He has said it about Reps. Ilhan Omar, Jasmine Crockett, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others. To Trump, Blacks are subhuman, suitable only to be lawn jockey yes men who prance for amusement, like Herschel Walker or Ben Carson.

In the Trump world view – and his supporters echo this like the cultists they are – Black people cannot lead. They certainly can’t be President of the United States, as the nearly two decade long ongoing right-wing shitfest over Barack Obama has shown us. And a Black woman? Even worse.

That is why the military incursions of D.C. and L.A. are so easy for Trump to sign off on. Trump has the point of view of the slave master, who believes that the Black bucks have to be broken and brought to heel. To him and his propaganda allies at outlets like Fox News, these cities have no real legitimacy. They have too many minorities and vote for too many Democrats to be “real.” So they must be broken.

To Trump’s “credit,” none of this is being done in private. Unlike his similarly minded ideological allies like George W. Bush and John McCain, Trump puts up no pretense while pushing his bigotry in the back room of the country club. It’s right on the front page. They all think like this, its just that Trump says it out loud and in front of the microphones because he’s an egotist who has only been rewarded for being openly a piece of shit.

Yet despite the clarity of his actions and rhetoric, it’s almost impossible to see what he is up to being clearly described. Instead, the mainstream media hides under euphemism, arguing that he just wants to be a mayor or that his brazen lies about crimes in the cities (which have gone down) are merely “at odds” with objective data.

Adding to the media gaslighting, his political opposition is at their usual default level of “tepid” at best. Here’s what Hakeem Jeffries, the House leader of the Democratic Party – who also happens to be a Black man – had to say: “Violent crime in Washington, D.C. is at a thirty-year low. Donald Trump has no basis to take over the local police department. And zero credibility on the issue of law and order. Get lost.”

Oh, okay. You showed him boss.

I don’t think there’s a magic “make Trump stop” button but the weakness in merely describing his brutal racism is on full display every day of his godforsaken presidency.

We are backsliding from a nation that just seventeen years ago finally elected its first Black leader. We’ve gone from the Obamas in the White House to Black cities under assault. This merits far more than mealy-mouthed weak responses, but there is nothing on the horizon that looks like it even knows what a pulse is.

Black America is under assault by a serial predator, and nothing is stopping him or even seriously rebuking his behavior and rhetoric.

If you like this newsletter, please consider becoming a paying subscriber by clicking here to join. I won’t be putting any of my regular columns behind a paywall and they will always be free. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed so far!

— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on BlueSky @owillis.bsky.social

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Some days you just wanna curl up and hide.

In June, the George Soros-aligned Texas Majority PAC announced that it would work with the Texas Democratic Party to spend millions to elect Democrats in that state.

The announcement comes less than a year after Colin Allred’s campaign spent nearly $100 million to lose to Ted Cruz by nearly 9 points. Before that it was Jaime Harrison getting destroyed in South Carolina and Amy McGrath getting obliterated in Kentucky.

Democrats lose races in spectacular fashion, but an entire legion of Democratic-aligned consultants, pollsters, campaign staffers and media buyers make a ton of money. Seems bad.

Democratic voters, from the big money donors to small donation individuals, love to feel like they are doing something – and donating to a campaign feels like the most “do something” move of all. But these investments are like individual pebbles of sand that simply wash out to the sea when the tide comes in. They don’t do anything long term and over the last 30-40 years, literally billions in donations have been effectively set on fire.

This isn’t to say that Democrats shouldn’t compete everywhere. Every race should have a Democratic option, even if it’s a long shot. But the party, and liberalism in general, is long past the point at which they should have been investing this money in something that would actually win these races: Media.

This is what Republicans did back in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Faced with what they saw as a stifling “liberal consensus” across academia, the media, and politics, the right not only took over the GOP via the Goldwater revolution, but they also invested heavily in media pushing their message.

The right has funded newspapers, radio shows, magazines, websites and tv networks (most notably Fox News of course) meant to influence the public discourse. It has worked. While they haven’t flipped stalwart Democratic states, the right-wing media infrastructure has reinforced their strength in base states, weakened the Democratic hold in previously swing states and been a net boon for the party. Right wing media infrastructure works as a farm team as well, grooming personalities to become Republican candidates or to work their way up from local punditry to positions of national influence.

By comparison, liberalism has barely put anything in media. The scope of liberal-based media investment has been narrow, at best, far too safe, and has had minimal impact. There simply is no liberal equivalent to the right-wing noise machine, and as someone who has worked directly within this ecosystem, I can tell you clearly we do not get anything resembling the support we need.

The excuses do not hold water. Liberals are ultimately not very different from conservatives in that we need constant care, maintenance and activation and respond to emotion-based appeals for support. You can go back to the wave of support that turned Barack Obama into a president or the recent support for Zohan Mamdani if you believe all of liberalism is cold and clinical policy analysis.

And don’t invoke Air America. Air America was a poorly conceived and executed idea from many people who simply did not understand how media works. It was over 30 years ago and was just one of many projects that should have received funding and support. And even then, some of the voices on that network – Rachel Maddow and Sam Seder – have proven themselves to be durable left of center voices nonetheless.

Democrats should stop wasting billions of dollars on doomed campaigns that don’t lay the groundwork for future success. Through media investments liberals can affect on the ground conditions that make wins in red states more than a pipe dream. Instead of lining the pockets of consultants that don’t care if the party truly wins or loses as long as they can buy a new boat or extension to their mansion, do something useful.

If you like this newsletter, please consider becoming a paying subscriber by clicking here to join. I won’t be putting any of my regular columns behind a paywall and they will always be free. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed so far!

— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on BlueSky @owillis.bsky.social

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My eagle-eyed editor at work.

What if everything you believed since you have been politically awake is wrong? It isn’t that you have bad intentions or you’re fundamentally stupid, but what if instead you believed for so long that the existing menu of political options was one group of beliefs but in reality, that was a really limited menu that excluded some really tasty items you never considered before?

When a rising progressive figure like Zohran Mamdani makes bold statements about what he wants to achieve, it can make regular old mainstream Democrats/liberals like myself wince. Government supermarkets? We shouldn’t have billionaires? Immediately that kicks in concerns about how Democrats are perceived. It isn’t just Mamdani. Ideas like defunding the police, universal basic income, free health care, etc.? Sure, we say, they may sound good on paper – but they also sound like left wing fantasyland, they’re just not “practical.”

And maybe they are impractical, unworkable, and election losers. But – what if not? We should at least have the conversation, I think.

Because for decades now American political discourse has been operating within the parameters set by the right wing, not the left. Since 1980 we have had 20 years of Democratic presidents and while I think they did a decent job of domestic politics between the three of them (Clinton, Obama, and Biden), much of what they did was within the narrow paradigm of what was acceptable behavior.

Clinton frequently talked about cutting the size of the government, Obama spoke about lowering the deficit, and Biden also used the language of “fiscal responsibility” as the right envisions it. All three men accepted the existence of billionaires and even pushed policies that would theoretically create even more of them. None of them would argue that the police needed to be defunded, and in fact they all oversaw federal spending that sent billions to police departments.

I was among the millions who supported these three presidents, along with other Democrats who ran for office with a similar world view both at the presidential and congressional level to varying degrees of success.

But these people have all been operating within the right’s paradigms. Collectively we never openly debated how we could have it all wrong. Maybe the prison system should be abolished? Maybe billionaires should be taxed out of existence?

Even if we don’t ultimately reach those conclusions, these are debates worth having.

Because while we have been limiting ourselves, the right hasn’t. Since Barry Goldwater in 1964, the right has been shifting the Overton Window – what is considered acceptable public discourse – steadily to the right. We have gone from Republicans like Nixon creating agencies like the EPA to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush cutting funding for vital agencies to Donald Trump trying to completely destroy agencies like the Department of Education.

Things that Trump treats as uncontroversially right-wing today would have been laughed out of the room as the ravings of lunatics in 1958. The right has mounted serial challenges to what was the liberal orthodoxy (not on every issue but most issues) in the 1960s and they have molded public perception of what acceptable dialogue is.

We are worse off for this. One can praise what Democratic leaders have accomplished in a progressive manner (health care, infrastructure, overall policy) and still admit that the thinking has been severely limited and inhibiting.

Voters are making this clear to the party. They keep showing in multiple federal and state elections that they are unhappy with the status quo and in some instances, like with Trump, they are far too eager to flirt with fascism versus maintaining the system as-is.

Think about the world that millennials and Gen-Z have lived in for their entire lives. Not only has it been shaped by Reaganism and Trumpism, but it has also been peppered with Democratic leaders like Obama, Clinton, and Biden who didn’t fundamentally challenge the bedrock of what the right laid but instead focused on (well needed) nibbling at the edges.

It has been a very long time, probably not since the Great Depression, where Democrats articulated the notion that something beyond the acceptable was possible. When Franklin D. Roosevelt first took office, the consensus was that bad stuff just had to happen and that the government had to lie back, helpless. Herbert Hoover couldn’t truly conceive of a universe where the government swooped in and actively combated the forces making things worse for ordinary Americans. Roosevelt shifted the window and set up the infrastructure of the safety net that still exists today (for now).

We need more of that, not less. Liberalism can’t just be about fending off the right and maintaining the status quo. The boundaries need to be pushed, or at the very least we need an open discussion about what those boundaries should be.

It’s the best way of fending off the right’s murderous dystopia.

If you like this newsletter, please consider becoming a paying subscriber by clicking here to join. I won’t be putting any of my regular columns behind a paywall and they will always be free. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed so far!

— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on BlueSky @owillis.bsky.social

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Kal-El has shifted the Overton Window to the point where dogs are in control.

Ever since Donald Trump came down his racist escalator and vaulted himself to become leader of the Republican Party in 2015, a popular theory has taken hold in liberalism and particularly at the highest levels of the Democratic Party: “Distraction.”

The idea goes something like this: Because Trump is a creature of the modern media environment and because we are constantly bombarded with narrative after narrative, Trump and his acolytes within the GOP are regularly setting off distraction bombs, meant to keep us occupied while they’re up to no good behind closed doors.

There were two recent invocations of distraction theory worth noting. First, the fight between Elon Musk and Donald Trump was purportedly a distraction from the harm of the “Big Beautiful Bill” that intends to destroy the social safety net. A few days later, some Democratic leaders argued that the attempted military incursion of Los Angeles over immigration was also a “distraction” from the bill. It was also argued by California Gov. Gavin Newsom – who is directly involved in the Los Angeles “distraction,” ironically – that the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador was also a “distraction.”

If it isn’t already clear, I think this theory of the world is very stupid and frankly counterproductive. It operates as if we are still somewhere in the distant past, when only a few narratives could ever operate at one time, usually with a clear “A” story and one or more less important “B” stories. But it is 2025 and that method of operation has long been obsolete.

We are in an ideological war with the American right. They are attacking everything good and right about America and are trying their damnedest to drag us back to the stone age when women, minorities, and LGBTQ people were a subordinate slave class to the whims of wealthy, straight, white men.

These things aren’t distractions. They are fronts. America fought war on two fronts during World War II, taking on the Axis powers in the European and Pacific theaters. There wasn’t any choice in the matter. There were American soldiers island hopping toward Japan and there were soldiers landing on the beaches of France and Italy on their way to Berlin. Leaders like Franklin Roosevelt and General Dwight D. Eisenhower, while they had to prioritize targets and objectives, didn’t have the luxury of saying the war couldn’t be fought on either side of the U.S. It was an existential battle for survival and they were victorious on both sides.

That is the situation we are in now against conservatism and Republicans. Liberals have to make the case, over and over, that these people are unfit to rule and shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the levers of power. Every action that liberals and its representatives within the Democratic Party undertake should underscore that clear goal.

That means war on multiple fronts. Sometimes that means pushing legislation and investigation. Sometimes that means a press conference or media briefing. And yes, sometimes that means childish insults, memes, and trash talk.

All the things.

Continuing to argue that fronts in this war are a distraction, because Democrats can’t reorient themselves to walk and chew gum at the same time, is an admission of weakness.

The party and the wider political movement that supports the party simply needs to adapt. If elected leaders don’t think they can do this, or that it is too difficult – they have to step aside and let someone who gets it handle the job. This is too important.

These are not distraction. This is the thing, and you have to fight all of it.

If you like this newsletter, please consider becoming a paying subscriber by clicking here to join. I won’t be putting any of my regular columns behind a paywall and they will always be free. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed so far!

— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on BlueSky @owillis.bsky.social

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Even when the world is a chaos pile of sadness, I have my dog.

Elon Musk is a Nazi-saluting weirdo with a breeding fetish who spent the last six months as the lead actor in an effort to usurp basic functions of the federal government, cutting off aid and research to millions of people across this country and the world, leading to major human suffering and death, along with the elevation of fascist ideals and a nihilistic world view that centers cutting taxes for the uber-wealthy while establishing racist and gendered hierarchies favoring straight white men like himself. He would like you to forget all that, and the mainstream media is helping him do it.

For the last two weeks Musk has been at the center of a very obvious public relations campaign. The man who champions X, formerly Twitter, as the leading media engine of the world has instead either directly spoken or had his P.R. handlers speak to CBS News, The New York Times, the Associated Press, and many other outlets – because when you actually want to talk to a mass audience this is still how you do things instead of shit posting on Twitter at two in the morning.

Communications-wise, Musk has made the right choice. In their “reporting” on Musk’s supposed departure from his little DOGE project and “return” to life running Tesla and SpaceX, the mainstream press has let the richest man in the world write almost the entire script. Musk is not challenged on his assertions that he purportedly is not on board with Trump’s disastrous second term, or that he wants to focus on his businesses after months spent rooting around in the most private data that Americans have trusted their government to keep secure. No, the mainstream press is so in love with the idea that their reporters get to drop to their knees for alpha Elon, they once again are doing a disservice to their audience and the world.

The pattern is so old and tired that it is hard to believe that we’re going through it again. But what we have to keep in mind is that the press isn’t being played, per se. If they were naïve little boys and girls that premise might have some kind of salience here, but the mainstream media is going into this farce as a clear-minded disinformation partner. These are the same people who saw everything we just saw, and most likely saw it up close and personal – and are hiding some of the more toe-curling details for the next round of books by Maggie Haberman and Jake Tapper, the Queen and King of Journalism High.

No, the mainstream media is playing along because – as Musk’s public relations people understand – they would rather a good story with a narrative arc rather than the truth, especially if the narrative gives pleasure to a billionaire that has the power to dispense traffic and revenue to the outlets in question.

The Musk clean up campaign is a violation of the public trust, yet another in a long and filth-ridden moments of the mainstream press fucking over the people who continue to put too much faith in them. Whether its pushing mythology about Al Gore being a liar, George W. Bush’s supposed certainty about weapons of mass destruction, elevating the right’s racist disinformation about the Obamas and Kamala Harris, both-sidesing Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s age, or obsessing over Hillary Clinton’s emails – the mainstream press is on the other side of what is right in this world, again and again.

It is up to those of us who aren’t in the corrupt cycle of influence and access to point out the truth, again and again. And it’s no longer useful (not that it ever was) to beg the mainstream press to tell the truth. They simply do not care. They are nihilists who don’t give a damn about public trust or collective good. They care about their piddling little careers and their advances in their tiny, out of touch social circles. They have zero interest in providing the public with the truth, information, or facts necessary to keep a society running.

The mainstream press, as seen in this episode of Musk fluffing, is the enemy of the truth and the amplifiers of lies and hate. Treat them all accordingly.

If you like this newsletter, please consider becoming a paying subscriber by clicking here to join. I won’t be putting any of my regular columns behind a paywall and they will always be free. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed so far!

— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on BlueSky @owillis.bsky.social

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Kal is ultimately, always, just a baby.

Over the last thirty years or so, on a pretty regular basis, someone will pop up in the political discourse with advice for the Democrats that is criminally stupid. Invariably, the person in question almost always ends up being someone who came from the presidencies or campaigns of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.

James Carville and David Axelrod are the highest profile versions of this, but it happens all the time. There are people who served as D-tier flunkies in the Clinton Commerce Department that somehow became cable news regulars offering up pablum on how Democrats shouldn’t embrace liberal ideas but instead should be phony-baloney Republican lite to win elections. This has to stop.

We can argue the relative merits of the Clinton and Obama presidencies (as well as Biden’s term, which in ways was Obama 3) but what is clear is that they are the past. The way politics operates now is significantly different from 2008, let alone 1992 – but Democrats keep listening to the people who coached during the leather helmet era of American politics.

And who are we really listening to here? Neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama were completely inept bumpkin politicians who couldn’t get elected without their Svengali political teams. In fact, both men are among the most naturally talented political minds in American history and two of this country’s best orators. Operating like Axelrod or Carville or their extended political orbit had some secret sauce and now has the winning playbook for future victories makes as much sense as turning to Tom Brady’s water boy for advice on winning the Super Bowl.

People look to the Clinton and Obama campaigns as examples of how to win, and while we should understand the timeless virtues of consistent messaging and appealing to a wide base of people, you need to adapt. Clinton didn’t have Fox News during his first run. Obama didn’t have Musk-led Twitter during his time in office. The news cycle of 2025 makes the news cycle of 1993 seem like the pace of a snail. There are overlapping issues that voters care about in both worlds – the economy always matters – but there are issues that were a huge deal in the 90s and mid-2000s that no longer matter and there are topics happening now that didn’t exist back then.

The way to navigate these waters isn’t by listening to what is more often than not an older white man saying politics should center around issues he, the older white man, cares about to the exclusion of everything else. The path is about navigating the future, letting new – and more diverse – voices into the inner circle and taking a critical eye to the past, keeping what worked and discarding what is irrelevant.

Liberal and Democratic Party politics are at a critical moment. Everything we stand for is under attack and must be defended and ultimately restored. We can’t effectively do this if we are constantly anchored to the past. The cartel did its thing, but its time to break it and move on to a new, better way.

If you like this newsletter, please consider becoming a paying subscriber by clicking here to join. I won’t be putting any of my regular columns behind a paywall and they will always be free. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed so far!

— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on BlueSky @owillis.bsky.social

Exclusive Kal-El Photo

Kal turned 6 on April 22. No matter what he’s always my baby boy.

Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office have been a failure. He has failed in the presidency in every way imaginable. He has wholeheartedly embraced a right-wing authoritarian approach to governance that has led to false imprisonment, death, economic failure and international disaster. But most importantly, Trump is a failure of conservatism.

Over the last ten years as Trump has secured full control of the Republican Party, there has been a concerted effort to depict Trumpism as some sort of aberration. We are told that Trump stands apart, that “MAGA” represents a break from the past and a separation from the conservative tradition. I think this is bullshit.

Trump is directly in line with his predecessors as the head of the American conservative movement. We cannot get to Trump without Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney and so many others. That is why Trump is such a failure. Trump’s second term is conservatism being allowed to run wild and that has been terrible for America and the world.

Trump is not a moderate, he is, as Mitt Romney once described himself while unsuccessfully running for president, “severely conservative.” Trump has buried America under a flurry of right-wing executive orders and policies, granted a blank check with no oversight by Republican leadership in the House and Senate. Trump has been allowed to pivot every agency of the government in a right-wing direction and the power to kill agencies whose very existence is anathema to right-wing desires.

It is a mess. Not only are innocent people being kidnapped and deported, but we are seeing anti-science initiatives run science agencies, incompetent boobs in the defense and intelligence agencies handing off secrets to adversaries and allies, and a host of failures and screw ups that will keep historians busy for centuries to come.

I have no idea how this will all end, but like Trump’s first term it will end badly. America is already worse off and thus far there is no end in sight. And yes, this has all been an even worse time because of the fecklessness of the Democratic Party in opposition. The Republicans are the primary actors in American failure, but the Democrats have played a pivotal role in enabling them with their votes and their unwillingness to stand up for what is right and decent. They will have to be a part of the reckoning as well.

But what we cannot do is allow these failures to be dismissed as a sideshow from conservatism. We keep doing that and this merely allows the right to hurt us all again. In the late eighties and early nineties, we got hit by the missile that was Reagan/Bush. We witnessed the dissolution of key infrastructure put in place by the post-World War II order generating fall out that we still deal with today. Reagan gleefully attacked Blacks with lurid lies about “welfare queens” and there’s no difference between that and Trump/Fox News’ spin about Latino immigrants. George W. Bush dragged us into the Great Recession while asleep at the wheel on 9/11 and lying us into Iraq. He spewed venom on weapons of mass destruction more than a decade before Trump attacked the truth as “fake news” – it’s the same thing.

Collectively Reagan and both Bushes escaped blame for their failures. Democratic leaders like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden chose to merely “turn the page” on what the right had done – contributing via neglect to the rise of the Trump-era right. Not only did the elections of those three men not slay the conservative dragon, but the network of liars and bigots that constitutes the Republican Party and the wider conservative movement grew stronger and more influential during their periods of leadership.

The road back will be tough. In all likelihood even this early one hundred days of disaster will seem like a bright spot when we look back on this time. Right now, nothing stands in the right’s way.

But the core understanding that we will need to take away is remembering that this is the outcome of conservatism. Trump is no aberration. This is the dream come to life, what the organizers who pushed Goldwater in 1964 wanted in their heart of hearts, what Romney and George W. Bush whisper about in the gold-plated quiet rooms of the country club.

Conservatism is a toxic mindset. We do not need a “strong Republican Party” as liberal leaders of the Democratic Party are so fond of saying. For the health of the world, conservatism needs constant and unrelenting opposition and to ultimately be brought to its knees and defeated. Conservatism is an existential threat to America and the world.

It needs to be kept away from the levers of power for all eternity, if we are ever to be safe and secure again.

If you like this newsletter, please consider becoming a paying subscriber by clicking here to join. I won’t be putting any of my regular columns behind a paywall and they will always be free. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed so far!

— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on BlueSky @owillis.bsky.social

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I’m always reading stuff about dogs waking up their families. This never happens to me. I’m always the one who has to wake up Kal.

I think Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should run for president in 2028. Honestly, it is hard to look at the turnout for her “Fight Oligarchy” tour with Sen. Bernie Sanders and the extremely slick videos her campaign is pushing out and come away thinking she isn’t running. This doesn’t feel like someone merely running for another term in Congress or even as a challenger for Sen. Chuck Schumer’s Senate seat. This feels like something more on the level of the 2007-2008 Obama campaign, or even Barry Goldwater’s 1964 crusade.

Personally, I think Ocasio-Cortez should run because the Democratic Party and America overall needs it to happen. Right now, under Donald Trump we are in the vice grips of a racist, authoritarian cult. But Trump didn’t come out of nowhere. Trump’s actions are built on decades of conservative groundwork, from the aforementioned Goldwater campaign to the Reagan presidency, to the Bush presidency, and yes – including the Romney and McCain campaigns. All of it.

In response to this multi-decade assault facilitated via operations like Fox News, Democrats have been tepid at best. The party simply does not know how to fight, and it constantly promotes from the ranks of the “don’t fight” caucus. Just a few weeks ago, still coasting from his attachment to Bill Clinton in a campaign that was conducted nearly four decades ago, James Carville told Democrats to lie down and play dead in a New York Times op-ed. Carville’s world view is not an outlier. Democrats have been playing dead for most of my adult life and I’m just a few years short of fifty.

Coming off of the Clinton 2016 and Harris 2024 losses, the party needs a come to Jesus moment, a full-throated fight to determine what, if anything, it stands for and how it intends to conduct itself in the future. The recent DNC chair race solved none of this, because DNC chair is not an ideological position – it’s all about basic party function. The ideology of the party is still determined by leaders like Schumer, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Right now that ideology is – to be blunt – weak shit.

Ocasio-Cortez is a progressive and to be sure that is why I like her, but what I like about her even more is that she isn’t afraid of it. I’m tired of liberalism that is afraid to say what it is out loud, or that insists that every celebration of liberal ideology has to be balanced by some mealy-mouthed statement acknowledging the purported legitimacy of the conservative world view. It isn’t legitimate and more Democrats need to act that way.

The arguments against Ocasio-Cortez running for president don’t feel very compelling to me.

She’s a woman. This is the weakest counterargument and the most un-American. America is all about doing the big thing that hasn’t been done before and fighting for it. Simply because two women lost the election after getting the nomination, we’re just supposed to stop? If, after a robust primary process the voters within the Democratic Party decide that a woman is the best person to do the job, then she deserves the nomination – but we can’t simply let misogyny win out again because we are unwilling to fight.

She’s a progressive/socialist. The Democratic Party has been nominating centrists for decades. If political ideology was all about matching the candidate to the country, we would be discussing the easy presidential wins from former Presidents Gore, Kerry, Clinton, and Harris. Democrats should pick the best candidate who appeals to the world they believe in – because that kind of pure belief is far better than playing fantasy campaign manager, selecting a nominee based on what you think is most acceptable to some mythical middle America voter.

She needs more experience. This is a really ridiculous one. Back in 2007 when Obama was first debating entering the race, I prayed he would do it because I fear what the Senate does to the mind of a human being. Look at Kerry and his Republican counterpart in terminal Senate brain, John McCain. I look at the Senate as a zombie that sucks the charisma out of people and turns them into near-automatons spouting nonsense about an amendment they offered in committee and other things normal people don’t understand.

Ocasio-Cortez understands the inner workings of the government far more than the average person. Several years of getting stifled by the Senate won’t change that. Similarly, I don’t see the logic in letting her linger in the House, even if she eventually ends up in a senior leadership position like Speaker.

To use a sports analogy, in the past NFL teams would draft a quarterback and let them sit on the sidelines, purportedly learning the ropes from a veteran signal caller. But in the modern NFL, a guy is drafted and immediately thrown into the deep end to see if they can sink or swim. To be certain, many times that leads to a spectacular bust – or, like in the case of my favorite team the Washington Commanders – a rookie takes you to within one game of the Super Bowl in his first year.

Both Obama and Trump jumped into their races when they had grassroots momentum. They both beat back the establishment candidate (Clinton for Obama, Jeb! for Trump). The rallies, along with years of well received rhetoric and attacks from the right-wing machine say to me that Ocasio-Cortez has that “juice” and it would be a shame to let it wither.

I’m not arguing that she would win the nomination or even the general election. Who even knows if we can have free and fair elections anymore? But the fact that this cornerstone of American democracy is even in question at this point sort of makes the case that the same old, same old cannot continue to be the answer.

Something more needs to be done, and as Ocasio-Cortez keeps saying “a better world is possible.” So maybe let’s try it.

If you like this newsletter, please consider becoming a paying subscriber by clicking here to join. I won’t be putting any of my regular columns behind a paywall and they will always be free. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed so far!

— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on BlueSky @owillis.bsky.social

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Kal turned 6 this week, amazing!

We liberals are ultimately optimists.

For many of us the perfect world would be something out the Star Trek universe, where geniuses have optimized all of life for maximum enjoyment, abundance, efficiency, and equity. In Trek world, there’s no need for money and there (mostly) aren’t wars over resources because the smart gals and guys have it all figured out. I want to live in that world, particularly in a Holodeck that would let me live out my fantasy of being Clark Kent.

But we don’t live in that world. It isn’t just because of Donald Trump, but in our Current Crisis he is the main actor in making the world suck, along with his propagandists at Fox News and his GOP enablers in Congress. We can’t have our utopian world because all of these various elements are flies in our ointment.

That doesn’t mean we cannot strive for Captain Kirk/Picard/Janeway/Sisko nirvana, but it does mean we have to deal with the world as it is.

In our perfect world, we would be able to persuade people away from making bad decisions and holding destructive positions merely by talking them out of it. There is a shared liberal delusion (in my POV) that the way to get this done is by simply talking to people. If we just sit down and rationally explain with these folks how they went wrong and how they can solve their individual issues, surely they will come around.

That’s how it works, right? Most of the time on Star Trek, the Captain can talk the villain of the week or some other entity the error of their ways and come to a satisfying conclusion. Sometimes on Star Trek you can even convince the Klingons to stand down instead of shooting first.

But the real world isn’t like this. If anything, trying rational persuasion leads to the other party digging in even deeper. The mere act of trying to get into their heads to understand the issue is caricatured as an insidious campaign to “get in their head” and even “brainwash” them.

The reality is most adults will need something very bad to happen to them or a loved one to change their minds. We cannot talk them off the ledge, they have to jump off and go splat on the pavement to understand it was a bad idea to dance on the edge of a building in the first place.

This feels illogical to us. We’re in the right. We’re doing a good thing. Can’t they understand we are trying to help them? If we feel in our hearts that we are doing What’s Best, surely they will feel that.

Unfortunately, no. Particularly when it comes to politics and all the associated ideas, people are pretty dug in. To be fair, if you’re a standard issue center-left person and someone came up to you and gave you a long speech about how we need to cut the safety net and accept racism, you wouldn’t budge either.

It isn’t two sides of the same coin but understand that they believe clearly crazy and wrong and destructive things with the same vehemence with which you understand that gravity is a thing that exists.

Ultimately, I believe the best course of action in many of these cases is to just give up. We have to accept the reality that many people are simply lost and not able to be recovered. This feels bad. We want to help our fellow man and woman and giving up on them feels like a failure.

But the problem lies with them, not us. We have our hearts in the right places but there’s just something within them that blocks coming to the right conclusion. Instead of beating our heads against the wall until it’s a bloody pulp, we should focus on the people who can realistically see the light.

I think it is a far more efficient use of time, which is finite, to focus on people who at a very minimum share reality with the rest of us. They may be politically apathetic or nihilistic, but unlike the most diehard they are not in a cult. In our world, which is very far from the domain of Spock, that’s putting us way ahead of the game.

In politics there are bandwagons. While you may not ever convert a diehard person, getting a persuasion-curious person to “yes we can” will sometimes lead to one stone loosening, then another, then another, and an eventual avalanche.

That can then – maybe – lead the most diehard to question their outlook. Because if 50-70 million people are swimming one way and they are swimming the other, perhaps they will at least ask: “Am I actually swimming the right way?”

This isn’t the most satisfying course of action. It feels like a loss to give up on people, especially if its someone you dearly love. But I think if we want any hope of getting to our Star Trek jetpack future with phasers, food replicators, and warp drives, this is the only viable path.

If you like this newsletter, please consider becoming a paying subscriber by clicking here to join. I won’t be putting any of my regular columns behind a paywall and they will always be free. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed so far!

— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on BlueSky @owillis.bsky.social

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The head is not going to scratch itself, hooman.

I’ve been railing against the Democratic Party’s lack of fighting skills for more than two decades, but the universality of the party’s current surrender posture has surprised even me. It seems wild to think that Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign theme of “when we fight, we win” was being loudly shouted just four months ago, because these Democrats do not have an ounce of fight – at all.

The leader of the surrender caucus is without a doubt Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is currently in the middle of his book tour/appeasement circus. Everything about Schumer screams “I have given up,” from his posture to his congressional votes to his weak rhetoric about Trump – in open defiance of federal courts at the moment – not yet crossing Schumer’s imaginary red line for breaking the law.

The Democratic strategy is clear, because it’s the strategy they have adhered to for nearly 30 years now. Lie back, allow the right to run roughshod over America, and then, when voters have absolutely had enough, reap the rewards.

We saw it in the 1990s with Clinton coming into power after the Reagan-Bush recession, Obama winning after Bush had destroyed the Middle East and wrecked the domestic economy, and Biden winning after Trump sat by and allowed COVID to kill thousands. Certainly it “works” for the party, but it is absolutely terrible for America and the rest of the world.

Compare this to recent Republican victories. Bush won after Clinton presided one of the largest peacetime expansions in history, Trump won after Obama engineered the post-recession recovery, and Trump won again after Biden pushed post-COVID renewal.

It is a sign of strength that the GOP can flip the presidency in good times, but Democrats need a disaster to have a shot.

The party doesn’t invest in long term strategy. Democrats are oriented around handing money to risk averse fat cat consultants who instruct party leadership to follow along with focus groups and polls, never getting ahead of the public on divisive issues – you might call it leadership, even.

We see the result of this today. There is an entire class of Democratic leadership, from Schumer and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and the people below them like Sen. Dick Durbin (and most Senate Democrats to be honest) who wouldn’t know a damned thing about taking a chance on an important topic. Democrats only act when it is “safe” to do so, whether that is having majorities in both houses of Congress, when an issue has flipped to 60+ percent support or when a crook like Trump commits such obvious crimes even Pelosi has to flip from her ridiculous stance that he was self-impeaching to introducing articles of impeachment.

This kind of behavior leads to the impression of success but not actual success. The Democrats, and liberalism in general, is woefully underprepared for Republican wins. We saw this in the early 2000s when the party simply had no idea how to respond to Bush. The party in fact enabled Bush’s most monstrous policy – the war in Iraq. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that three of the Democrats who voted for the war (Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Joe Biden) went on to be the party’s presidential nominees.

They were flatfooted after Trump’s 2016 win and unbelievably they have been even worse following his win last year. Even after the immediate shock, its clear they have not formulated any kind of strategy to deal with him in the months since, not even a half-assed one.

The posture is complete surrender in the hopes that he fucks up so badly the only response is a vote for Democrats. This assumes that we will have free elections in the future and that voters aren’t so disgusted by Democratic weakness that they will still show up to vote for them. I’m skeptical.

While I acknowledge we live in a two-party system, it seems pointless to many to keep showing up for Democrats who won’t show up for us when it counts.

How motivated can people feel to get out and vote for a Democratic senate when the best it can muster is mealy-mouthed weakness from leaders like Schumer? Yes, a Democratic House is better than a Republican one, but how much is America served by more lukewarm rhetoric from Jeffries about “MAGA Republicans” when the problem is the entire conservative movement and the complete Republican Party?

The Democratic Party is fundamentally broken, even when they win. We’ve spent too long with a party and wider liberal movement that is satisfied with merely being “not Republicans.” The country deserves far better and continuing the status quo and its weak leadership just isn’t it.

If you like this newsletter, please consider becoming a paying subscriber by clicking here to join. I won’t be putting any of my regular columns behind a paywall and they will always be free. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed so far!

— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on BlueSky @owillis.bsky.social

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This is the sixth year of Kal-El sitting on my shoulder, and he’s never looked more majestic.

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More than anything in the world, Donald Trump loves to slap his name on top of a product. There is an endless line of bankrupt casinos, failed steaks, kaput airlines, and a shuttered scamtastic fraud “university” bearing his name.

But the biggest product that he can now slap his cheap looking gold-plated moniker in front of is – unlike most of his life – purely his own doing: The end of America.

Watching Trump’s orchestrated screaming session targeting Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy was the most disgusting presidential act I have seen in my life since George W. Bush lied us into the Iraq War. This sneering fucking clown of an American “president,” howling at a leader who has witnessed Vladimir Putin violate his nation’s sovereignty and bomb its civilian population was as appalling as it gets.

It would have been bad enough if Trump was just the racist drunk at the end of a bar, but he did what he did purportedly speaking for the American people. Well, I can say plainly: Donald Trump can fuck all the way off.

He is an incurious retrograde bastard who isn’t fit to lick the pavement on Pennsylvania Avenue, let alone occupy our White House. Trump is a common thug, owned by Putin and a weapon targeted at hard-fought civil rights. Trump is an abomination, and he is bringing about the end of a nation I love dearly.

America is far from perfect and our flaws too numerous to mention. But the point of America, as Dr. Martin Luther King repeatedly said, was to continue striving towards the lofty picture painted by the founders. King noted that the slave-holding founders called for “freedom” from British tyranny and that it was the job of the civil rights movement to take that cynical rhetoric and translate it into concrete reality.

Trump trashes those ideals every day he is in office. Trump fights against rights and equality and accelerates corruption, bigotry and hate. Every facet of the government that he touches is now tainted, a weapon used to advance his sinister destructive goals.

The man and the Republican Party acting at his behest are a parasitic virus, gnawing on the soul of the country and hollowing out our values and beliefs.

They must be opposed and rejected at every front. This is not a time for “picking battles” and “keeping our powder dry” as the feckless Democratic Party has been chanting endlessly for decades. Trump’s sickness must be opposed and if they aren’t willing to do the job then they should be removed, either voluntarily or forcibly.

America should stand for freedom, liberty and justice. These are not negotiating positions. Either we are for these things or we are not. A nation like Ukraine must be supported and defended against tyrannical dictatorships like Russia – and increasingly, America. The country that once stood against the fascist Axis in World War II now operates on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum.

That dynamic has to change, or America simply dies.

If you like this newsletter, please consider becoming a paying subscriber by clicking here to join. I won’t be putting any of my regular columns behind a paywall and they will always be free. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed so far!

— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on BlueSky @owillis.bsky.social

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In these trying times, everyone needs a dog on the desk.

The United States of America is under attack from a racist South African billionaire, operating as the puppet master for a delusional and similarly bigoted fascist, Donald Trump. This sounds like the plot of a bad thriller novel, but if anything, this understates the state of America since January 20, 2025.

Musk and his DOGE cronies are inside the federal government after being given a golden ticket by Trump and aided by the acquiescence of the Republican congressional leadership. DOGE thugs are intimidating federal workers, violating the privacy of millions of Americans, and wrecking decades of work meant to assist the most vulnerable in this country and others. It is an immoral travesty but even more than that – it is an attack.

The conservative ideology of Musk and Trump – and it has been the dominant school of thought within the right for decades, these two are just worse at dressing it up than George W. Bush and Mitt Romney – believes in hurting the vulnerable while increasing the wealth and power of an elite few. Their mindset believes that nobody is of primary importance to the world than extremely wealthy, straight, white men and that everyone else must bow to them and lick their shit-stained boots.

You cannot negotiate or engage in good faith discussions with people like this. They have to be ousted. The notion that an opposition political party or movement can get ahead by simply focusing the public on poll-tested notions like “kitchen table issues” is self-soothing nonsense. The Trump/Musk axis must be opposed in the way that all fascist movements, particularly their forefathers in the German Nazi movement, must be opposed: Completely and without yielding.

In a practical sense this means grinding all their actions to a halt. Trump has been significantly aided in his latest assault by the acquiescence of the Democratic Party. Not only did Democratic leadership gladhand with him after the election and attend his woeful inauguration, but in Congress they have still gone along with votes for his unqualified nominees and in some cases voted for them. Unacceptable.

Whenever Musk and Trump ask for something, they must be denied. Democratic members of Congress must throw up roadblocks in procedure, forcing the cessation of this sham with as much legislative force as they can. I fully understand that Democrats do not have the top line votes to prevent Trump’s agenda, but they don’t have to vote to proceed to a full vote. They don’t have to pick and choose which nominations to support “on the merits.” It’s all one big ball of anti-freedom, un-American bullshit so act accordingly.

The media is in cahoots with Trump/Musk as well. Multiple press barons like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and others have bent the knee to Trump and in Bezos’ case just outright handed his wife a bribe. They must also be opposed and battle engaged. The press must be constantly and consistently called out for carrying the axis’ water, and this cannot relent. The newspapers, websites and television networks are not watchdogs of our democracy but rather they are panting dogs humping the leg of autocracy. They are not with the people, and we should never be fooled that the mainstream press truly cares about anything other than their bottom lines and getting invites to the nicest parties.

I am not optimistic for the short term. The Democratic Party and the liberal/left movement has been caught, again, flat footed. The leaders are compromised or disengaged and there have only been fleeting signs of life in the first few weeks of occupation.

But because I am probably stupid, I am still hopeful. I actually believe in the idea of America and that the vast majority of us believe in the best upside of what this country is capable of. Despite too-frequent stumbles, I refuse to accept the notion that a majority of this nation wants bigotry and incompetence to flourish. And frankly, even if there are more on that side of things I love this country too much to let them destroy it from the inside.

So we can fight and we can win. We just have to fight.

If you like this newsletter, please consider becoming a paying subscriber by clicking here to join. I won’t be putting any of my regular columns behind a paywall and they will always be free. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed so far!

— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on BlueSky @owillis.bsky.social

Exclusive Kal-El Photo

Kal had a teeth cleaning this week and had to be sedated. It left him feeling wonky and tired so I had to capture it. He’s back to normal now after a day of sleeping off the after effect.

In 1964, conservatives began their takeover of the Republican Party. They were rebelling against a Republican establishment that they viewed as risk-averse, stodgy, and unwilling to push the boundaries of American politics – and saw them as particularly afraid of pushing conservative ideas against the centrist consensus.

Ultimately their candidate, Barry Goldwater, was trounced by President Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 landslide. But Goldwaterism played the long game and ultimately led to successful candidates like Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. More importantly, the conservative revolution was a success for the Republican Party at the congressional and state level – and especially at the Supreme Court. We live in the America shaped by the Goldwater insurgency.

Contrast this with the Democratic Party at its crisis points. After Reaganism took over, Democrats decided their problem was the left and Clinton moved to the center. He won and while he had some achievements (most notably the economy), he surely did not advance America to the left to the degree that other Democrats like Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt had. And under Clinton the right continued to amass power, eventually taking over the House in 1994.

Less than a decade later and Bush slipped into the White House. He trashed the place via the Iraq War and his mismanagement of the domestic and global economy, and Obama won in the modern equivalent of a landslide. But then again, while we got good legislation like the Affordable Care Act and policy like ending the war – Obama did not advance the progressive ball. Obama, like Clinton, was ideologically cautious to a fault. To be sure, some of that was tempering progressive idealism versus liberal realism, but too much of it was overcautious. For instance, there was no logical reason for the Recovery Act to be so conservative nor did Obama need to hem and haw as long as he did on same-sex marriage or killing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Then Trump happened, like Bush he trashed the place and we ended up with President Joe Biden. Biden easily lapped both Clinton and Obama on progressive-minded legislation, but again there was this endless caution throughout his presidency and the reluctance to embrace modern communications rhetoric, tactics, and techniques. Throughout all of the preceding presidencies, the Democratic Party embraced caution at the congressional and state level as well. Instead of embracing even a strong liberal identity, the Democrats have been in a state of stasis – holding on to a center-leftism that to be sure is a far better course of action than destructive conservatism but does not inspire voters nor provide a level of radicalism needed to take the country to the next level.

Even worse, cautious liberalism is a poor counter to the extreme conservatism descending from Goldwater that now runs the Republican Party. Conservatives are inspired, not just by demagogic leaders like Trump and G.W. Bush, but by the ideology of their movement that foolishly says government must be run like a business while also crushing the rights of women, minorities, and the LGBTQ community. Against that tide, liberalism has become a movement of protecting institutions and norms. This is has been particularly egregious under the leadership of people like Biden, Obama, and Sec. Hillary Clinton.

Radicalism vs. caution won’t hold and the 2024 election showed us that absent an event like COVID or the Great Recession, conservative radicalism motivates more people to show up. But the Democratic Party establishment, in my opinion still in a holding pattern following Reagan’s landslide in 1984, is utterly disinterested in adaptation. It is far easier for them – and I am specifically referring to figures like President Biden, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer – to blame the left or “the groups” for their losses, rather than taking a serious look at how the party fails to inspire even against the right’s dystopia.

That’s why there needs to be a Democratic equivalent of the Goldwater movement, or at least the Tea Party movement that began an insurgency within the GOP after John McCain lost to Obama.

People upset with the direction of the Democratic Party often suggest the launch of a third party, but that historically has not been viable. The two major parties have an effective stranglehold on ballot access and building a brand-new party takes time that is simply not a luxury America has.

The two major parties are actually quite weak and relatively ripe for some sort of takeover. In 2008, the Democratic establishment coalesced around Sec. Clinton as its nominee early and never saw the Trump takeover coming. After a tough primary, Obama won and secured leadership of the party despite being a nobody in 2004. Similarly, post-Obama the Republican Party establishment didn’t see Trump coming and were ready to anoint Jeb (!) Bush until Trump came down his ridiculous escalator and launched an insurgency. He has now led the party for nearly a decade and it has been molded in his racist, xenophobic mirror image.

Right now, the Democrats are at their weakest point in decades, not just in political power but in ideological leadership. Outside of opposition to conservative destruction, the party stands largely for clinging to its past accomplishments: Protecting Social Security, Medicare, Obamacare and the like. These are all noble, worthy things but people need more. They need to have some sort of idea beyond the horizon that unifies them, and history and common sense shows us that these things have to be on the left side of the aisle (universal health care, basic income, etc) and not uninspiring centrist mush.

Politics can no longer just be about the next two-to-four-year cycle for the Democrats. Short-term thinking of this variety, along with a resistance to building up a progressive media environment, gives the right power. It enables fascism. It leads to spectacles like Biden broadly smiling as he welcomes Trump into the Oval Office.

Democrats need their Goldwater. More importantly, the country needs a progressive Goldwater to take on the party, because otherwise it is another victory for conservatism and the country simply cannot take more of it. We won’t survive.

If you like this newsletter, please consider becoming a paying subscriber by clicking here to join. I won’t be putting any of my regular columns behind a paywall and they will always be free. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed so far!

— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on BlueSky @owillis.bsky.social

Exclusive Kal-El Photo

Sometimes Kal lets me borrow the chair in his office. But its definitely his chair.

The most troubling take on the 2024 election that I have frequently heard is the notion that Vice President Kamala Harris ran a “perfect” campaign. This argument, which is believed by some of the most diehard supporters of the Democratic Party, argues that Harris did the best possible, but the headwinds of soaked-in misogyny, racism, and disinformation were just impossible to overcome.

I think this worldview is the liberal world’s funhouse mirror reflection of the MAGA cult mindset that surrounds Donald Trump and the GOP. In Blue MAGA mind, the party did nothing wrong. The party fought the good fight and there wasn’t anything that could have been done to change the election results. In Blue MAGA mind, Americans are just dummies who went the wrong way and the best that we can do is mock the people who voted for leopards as they wail while the leopards gnaw away at their faces.

This approach lets the party off the hook for rank incompetence. Not just under Biden, but for decades of operation. The party is not okay, not by a long stretch and embracing the Blue MAGA argument avoids a tough internal conversation about how the Democratic Party keeps failing its members and the country.

To be clear I absolutely acknowledge the forces acting against Harris that were beyond her control. The nexus of disinformation from right-wing and mainstream media, misogyny, racism, et cetera is all real. Maybe there is nothing the party could have done to win and the loss was already baked in no matter what. That still isn’t an excuse to avoid all the mistakes the party keeps making, particularly on the basic stuff of American politics.

The Democrats are a party that stands on the right side of most issues but are piss-poor at communicating those notions to the American people. The party lacks any sort of cohesive information architecture or strategy and leaders of the party holding elected office are lackadaisical about communicating with the public – and when they do bother to speak out, the language and methods are archaic most of the time. Even if the media and social environment were perfect, the party would have problems communicating in this mess, so it’s even worse since the environment is a toxic garbage dump.

When they’re not communicating competently the party is also governing and legislating incompetently. Democrats may be America’s liberal party, but they are beholden to a conservative approach. The party is disinterested in proposing legislation designed to advance its ideological goals, preferring instead to only back legislation that has a realistic chance to pass, rather than backing bills designed to fail which would elicit friction with the other side – activating support from voters. At the same time, the party legislates as if bipartisanship is the end goal, rather than providing policies and services to help people. And then it stinks at communicating the benefits of those policies to people.

This was the party that Biden then Harris led, and it had these same problems – or some variation of them – under Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, as well as the eras when it was out of the White House and in the minority.

Acknowledging these problems and working to fix them is not undermining the party. America is (for now at least) a two-party country and it needs a competent Democratic Party to hold off the menace within the Republican Party. We can’t get there with a defensive posture that assumes the party can do no wrong and can only be failed by insufficient loyalty to the party.

Blue MAGA mindset hobbles the Democrats and therefore hobbles the country. Is it anything like the destructive forces behind MAGA within the Republican Party? Of course not and it would be silly to argue such a thing.

But if winning the fight is important, you can’t win with both hands tied behind your back. Reflexive defensiveness embraced by Blue MAGA does just that. It allows the party establishment to get away with doing things the same failed way over and over again, only winning elections after Republicans have gotten thousands of people killed and set our country (and the world) back decades.

I don’t think soothing the egos of powerful people leading the party, arguing that they ran “perfect” campaigns, is worth that cost. Any kind of MAGA mindset hurts America, whether it is wearing a red hat for Trump or making excuses for decades of failed Democratic Party operation.

If you like this newsletter, please consider becoming a paying subscriber by clicking here to join. I won’t be putting any of my regular columns behind a paywall and they will always be free. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed so far!

— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on BlueSky @owillis.bsky.social

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Toy time is serious time for Kal.

I have been a registered Democrat since 1995, the year I turned 18. Now, 29 years later, for the first time ever I have seriously been considering changing my party registration. Why? Because since Donald Trump won the Democratic Party appears to have little to no interest in fighting for the things it purports to stand for.

I fully understand that Trump legally won the election and he swept the key swing states needed to secure all of the votes for the Electoral College. I’m not calling on Democrats to storm the Capitol or break the law or even hold up the certification process. But it has been a gut punch to see how quickly the party that campaigned on “When we fight, we win” has raced at breakneck speed to surrender and capitulate.

The problem starts at the very top, with President Biden. Under the Constitution, Biden is required to leave his office on January 20. That’s it. He is not required to crack jokes with the incoming party, gladhand with an open racist, or pose for photographs and video with a man who spent nearly a decade alleging that the first Black president was illegally occupying the presidency as a foreign usurper. But Biden did all of that anyway, welcoming Trump into the White House because the only thing Democrats seem to really believe in is norms and tradition.

Biden won the White House saying, rightfully, that this was a “battle for the soul” of the nation. He was victorious in the first fight, in 2020, but when his party and Vice President Harris faltered this year, he lead the cave-in. Unfortunately, Biden has not been alone and this isn’t just about his unfortunate decades-long addiction to an era of bipartisanship that never existed.

Elected leaders ranging from Reps. Ro Khanna and Jared Moskowitz, to senators like John Fetterman and Richard Blumenthal, have lavished praise on the crooked billionaires and malcontents that now set poised to feast on the entrails of the United States. Even Bernie Sanders seems dazed and confused, buying into Elon Musk’s nonsense to some extent about “cutting” government. Trump hasn’t even been inaugurated yet and much of official Washington seems prepped to crown him king.

Then there are figures like Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who always seems to be reading from a Powerpoint presentation on how to appeal to a mythical focus group, making bloodless and passion-deprived statements from the podium in the Capitol and via his social media account. Jeffries seems to believe that not offending anyone and not actually saying anything can inspire support and devotion. He is wrong.

Meanwhile, the few Democrats who seem to have actually paid attention to what the party has claimed to stand for are being ignored or squashed by the old guard of the party, led by Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Jim Clyburn. The party didn’t even seriously consider the notion of giving Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a shot at being the ranking member of the Oversight Committee, despite the fact that her presence on that committee has been a constant highlight over the years. No, these Democrats would rather wrap their fingers around the precious bits of power they have left instead of setting up the party for the future.

Trump is going to be a disaster of epic proportions. He is going to put in place cronies and policies that will undermine the great American experiment. He will bring shame and dishonor to the freedom that men and women have sacrificed their lives for, both on foreign shores but also right here in our cities and towns, fighting for rights and respect. He needs to be opposed, defeated, humiliated and constantly countered.

The party establishment, from President Biden on down, has shown absolutely no interest in even considering this task — let alone offering up rhetoric and resilience that the country needs at a time of crisis. They have abandoned us, but they sure as hell want money from us to keep the consultants fat and happy and the party coffers filled so they can waste it again and again.

I like to think of myself as a realistic optimist. Someone who believes in a better day but without being blinded to the very real obstacles in the way. I do not give up easily and I still have not given up. But as far as the politics of this country goes, I think we are at a worse point than the last time we saw this level of Democratic surrender — back in 2001 as George W. Bush stood on the skulls of those dead in the 9/11 attacks, prepping his path to war in Iraq and reelection in America.

The right is doing what it has always done: Reflecting the worst of America with a banality of evil in the mold of tyranny and fascism. Unfortunately for us all they are effectively without opposition as they drag us down with them.

The Democrats are in surrender mode and we will pay the price for their cowardice.

If you like this newsletter, please consider becoming a paying subscriber by clicking here to join. I won’t be putting any of my regular columns behind a paywall and they will always be free. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed so far!

— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on BlueSky @owillis.bsky.social, Threads @owillis1977

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Kal-El only surrenders to sleep.

Check out the progressive/liberal/leftist news aggregator I created at breakingnewsusa.com and please share it with everyone.

To start off, I would like to make it clear that the Democratic Party does not engage in serious political fights. Not really. The party sometimes has debates with the right and wins or loses, sometimes resulting in the passage of legislation or nominations, but in a serious modern sense the party does not fight.

In fact, more often than not the Democrats roll over and play dead for the right and allow a gang of malcontents and unqualified ideologues run roughshod not just over our government, but across the public sphere. Sometimes Democrats show some signs of life, usually very close to an election, but the majority of the time the party sleepwalks through its existence.

This behavior has very real consequences. People are (understandably) cynical about politics and they simply do not believe most politicians when they make grandiose promises. That leads to apathy and gigantic swaths of the electorate simply do not show up at the polls. Sometimes things catch fire with a particularly inspirational leader, like President Barack Obama, or a crisis, like COVID-19, and a legitimate groundswell occurs. But unfortunately more often than not, the core voters that Democrats need to show up do not show up and as a result liberal and left causes suffer — and thousands of people die.

The right shows up to vote and it isn’t because they are offering anything truly populist that motivates millions. What they do far better than the left is fight. Most of it is a fight over really dumb things, harmful things, bigoted things — but they fight. The right is constantly engaged in great battle with any number of forces — the deep state, the media, the Democratic Party, the progressive/liberal movement — whatever. Yes, the substance of it is dumb and ultimately harmful, but the act of political combat is a marvelous motivator.

The right fights for things, they tell their base voters they’re fighting for those things, and they explain in no uncertain terms that Democrats are the obstacle to Wonderland and if they turn out to vote they will get what they always dreamed of. Of course, this isn’t true for most things and when it does go all the way (repealing Roe v. Wade) it triggers massive human suffering. But that’s a policy argument, not a tactical one.

The tactic works and liberals should steal it.

What is more aggravating is that these are good and easy fights to have. The right has an unpopular agenda fronted by cartoonish villains that would seem too broad for a cartoon or comic book. The orange skinned con man. The South African racist. The pale-skinned billionaire with a fetish for the blood of young people. It goes on and on and on. Picking a fight in this environment with these terrible people is not hard.

Democratic officials need to speak out and they need to constantly be speaking out. Congressional leaders have never had more ways to get beyond the filter of the media and speak directly to millions of voters for almost nothing. They all have social media accounts, including TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and a million others. It only takes time to grab a phone and shoot out a message - text, video, image - hitting on an issue.

They don’t and shouldn’t pick their shots. They should hit everything under the sun in the hopes that maybe one out of a thousand will hit. It doesn’t matter if the other 999 appeals fail if one catches fire.

And the message just needs to be simple and to the point. You aren’t trying to impress a college professor for a grade and a message does not increase in virality by the age level it is written for (in fact it is probably the opposite).

In addition to social media messages and press releases, Democrats need to just jump in front of a microphone. There are a million microphones set up at any given moment on Capitol Hill, along with a hornets nest of reporters looking for an easy story to serve up across their platforms. Use them.

Generate heat and light. Don’t just send out a message that is cotton candy soft. Use direct and blunt language and contrast what you stand for with the worst people on the other side. If you release a statement about your support for puppies, remind the world that the other side wants to kill puppies and has callously worked to block the passage of your puppy protection plan.

Most importantly, repeat these messages over and over and over. Too often Democrats send out a limp message into the void and when it predictably doesn’t gain traction, they proclaim, “See, it didn’t work.” This is weak crap and an excuse that Democrats have now used for decades.

Lean on partisan, alternative media to get your message out. And when the mainstream press ignores you, use that as yet another messaging opportunity. “I can’t believe ABC/CBS/NBC is censoring our support for protecting puppies, jump on my live stream as we talk about how the corporate media is weighing in on the side of puppy murdering psycopaths!”

None of this requires leaders to lie or distort reality. In fact, short and punchy and understandable messaging works best when it is backed up by the truth. Donald Trump’s short lies are effective political messaging, but they would be 10,000% more effective if he was telling the truth. He never will, so steal his style and use it in service of what is good and decent.

Fighting for good things tells the people who support your mindset the most that you aren’t rolling over and playing dead. Even when you lose, people have far more respect for someone who goes down swinging versus someone who holds fire until just the right moment. Democrats are guilty of waiting so long to let their powder dry that it is now an enormous, inert, useless caked mess.

Fight and keep fighting — not only will your core supporters become more engaged and likely to vote in favor of you and your agenda, but people love a winning bandwagon. People who may be cynical about it all will see conflict and see someone for once actually taking their side — and against villains out of central casting.

If you don’t want to fight, or to fight using modern techniques, then just get out of the way. Because more than ever America needs people completely invested in fighting. It’s the only option that is left.

If you like this newsletter, please consider becoming a paying subscriber by clicking here to join. I won’t be putting any of my regular columns behind a paywall and they will always be free. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed so far!

— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on BlueSky @owillis.bsky.social, Threads @owillis1977

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Kal-El is a vicious hunter, displaying his latest kill.

The United States of America is over 3.7 million square miles of territory inhabited by over 334 million people. The very notion that one could govern such a massive enterprise with a skeleton government that allows the fairy tale free market to magically handle everything is laughable. Yet it has been the core ideology behind conservatism and the Republican Party since the 1960s.

The movement has been extremely successful nonetheless at selling the idea that if they just had their shot, they could prove that what they’ve been saying is more than just the ravings of crackpots with a Revolutionary War fetish. Well, now is their chance.

Elon Musk is apparently a true believer in this nonsense (ignore the fact that the bulk of his grotesque wealth comes from fat contracts and support from big government), and he bought and paid for Donald Trump to execute on this world view. The GOP has a congressional majority and a bribed and paid for Supreme Court to give them a judicial free hand.

So my advice for liberals is this: Let them do it.

Small government doesn’t work. Small government is the catastrophic response to Hurricane Katrina, COVID, and the Great Depression and the Great Recession. Small government leads to human suffering, national disaster, and economic failure. Business runs best with a strong, robust government providing oversight of competition, consumer protection, and national economic security.

The best version of America is one with a strong centralized government administering to the massive needs of a giant country with a huge population. The Trump-Musk vision is doomed to failure. The notion that America can be run with anything resembling competence with Musk’s “DOGE” committee hounding federal bureaucrats is insanely dumb, but they own this now.

People are going to be hurt, and they are going to die. Liberalism tried to avert this situation but thanks to docility by the Democratic Party, dishonesty by the mainstream media, and thuggery from the right, we are here anyway. Our role? To tell everyone involved, including the public who went along with it, that we told you so.

That means shaking off the Clinton/Obama-era compulsion to still pay lip service to small government braying. That’s over now. Those voters who care about small government (and it was always an overstated number) are hardcore Republicans now. It is time to embrace the big government instincts of past liberal leaders like Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Teddy Roosevelt – with of course a mindset more attuned to the current century.

Big government addresses the big problems faced by a big country. We are not children fooled by the notion that we can still run the nation as if it were a few thousand people running around in the colonial mud in 13 states subsidized by the labor of enslaved Blacks. We know that we need the government to secure the country, respond to disasters, survive pandemics, protect consumers against corporate greed and excess, and to keep the roads and bridges and rail lines and ports vital to commerce up and operating and protected. Liberalism is adult, conservatism is child’s play.

Failure is coming to America. As a movement, liberalism must be ready to address and brand the coming failure as powered by conservatism. We must also offer up ideas to fix these mistakes (most of them will look like the stuff we have always supported, because liberalism was a response to laissez faire conservatism before the Depression), but the day of taking the high road and not linking the looming disaster to conservatism has to stop.

Right-wing ideas are laughably bad, and I think ironically that Trump has enough of a sensitivity to public opinion that even he understands some of this stuff will blow back on him and his movement. But I also think the horse has left the barn and he will go along with most of it, because he doesn’t care about policy. Musk and most Republicans in Congress don’t have this same kind of outlook because they’re (more or less) true believers.

Make no mistake, this coming nightmare isn’t good for America or the world. But it is a unique opportunity in the midst of chaos to beat the hell out of the idea that is the underpinning of conservatism. Let’s go.

If you like this newsletter, please consider becoming a paying subscriber by clicking here to join. I won’t be putting any of my regular columns behind a paywall and they will always be free. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed so far!

— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on BlueSky @owillis.bsky.social, Threads @owillis1977

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This is the only good way to watch TV.

Following the unfortunate result of the 2024 election, it is more clear than ever that the mainstream media is not to be trusted. This is a list of liberal/progressive/alternative media outlets based on this thread. Please read them, like their content, and most importantly — share it with your network, no matter how small.

If you have suggestions/additions please add them in the comments.

Daily Kos
Media Matters for America
OptOut News
The Nation
Raw Story
Crooks & Liars
Crooked Media
Truthout
SiriusXM Progress
Talking Points Memo
Zeteo
The Majority Report
Popular Information
Public Notice
Mother Jones
The Barbed Wire
Heartland Signal
Defector
ProPublica
The New Republic
The Guardian
The American Prospect
404 Media
Common Dreams
Wonkette
The Intercept
Lever News