Thank you, Chris Hedges, for acknowledging the great works of a great human being!
What American alive today has lived a better or more heroic life than Ralph Nader? Made more meaningful contributions to their society and the world? Stood up against evil and neo-fascist corruption more than Nader has?
The corporatists’ unyielding hatred of Ralph Nader, and their smearing of his name with nonsense, simply testify to how well this eminently rational and moral man has lived his life – and how very much he’s accomplished.
This is how you get “disappeared” off American media, blacklisted as if you never existed: You resist fascism, stand up for human rights, and fight for the truth, saving countless lives along the way.
You help your society begin to comprehend who its most grave enemies are, and you lead our struggle against the serially racist, mass-murdering, rule of law eviscerating, corporatist quislings calling themselves “Democrats” and “Republicans.”
(Though both parties serve identical paymasters and the same omnicidal agenda, the average Republican president does so far less competently than the average Democrat, who can actually speak in complete sentences, unlike his GOP counterpart. The Bushes, Trump, and Ronald Reagan represent the GOP perfectly: mentally non-robust, obviously venal, bumbling clods who impeded and discredited the neo-fascist regime rising in the U.S. – the same regime so competently advanced by the “successful” right-wing presidency of Bill Clinton; the very same neo-fascist regime that President Obama needlessly rescued when it was gasping its last foul breath after GWB had inadvertently totaled it… So competent, so polished, so tragic, these Democrats.)
If only Barack Obama had governed with even a fraction of Ralph Nader’s integrity, Main Street (and most African-American households) wouldn’t have been sacrificed on the altar of Wall Street fraud. The middle class would still be limping along, rather than utterly decimated. The neocon wars and assault on our civil liberties would not have been so dramatically expanded, leaving us no semblance of healthy, functioning democratic institutions.
And under that hypothetical, ethical President Obama, it’s fair to assume that the DNC would not have blatantly rigged its primary in 2016.
Trump wouldn’t be in the White House, and Bernie Sanders almost assuredly would be.
The world’s loss… simply because most of the American electorate doesn’t know how to stop voting for fascism’s most ardent proponents, Team Red and Team Blue.