“There’s a big election coming up.”
“Yes, I heard.”
“An important opportunity to repudiate fascism, yes?”
“Definitely, but what makes you think everyone’s going to vote third party?”
“Fascism, stupid… what Trump and the Republicans are peddling.”
“Agreed. That’s Fascism Brand R, as in revolting, repugnant, racist, and reviled the world over… But then there’s Fascism Brand D, infiltrated top to bottom, these days, with Wall Street/PhRMA/Monsanto/fossil fuel lobby (corporate) courtesans, former Republicans, intelligence agents, and neocons pushing WWIII on a load of baseless propaganda. Fascism Brand D: the journalist/whistleblower-hunting party that took over every extreme right-wing/Heritage Foundation/PNAC position and made it policy while calling itself ‘liberal,’ because Republicans just weren’t up to the Herculean tasks of ending welfare (70% of which went to poor children, disproportionately black), passing NAFTA (devastating workers and the middle class), exploding mass-incarceration and The New Jim Crow… repealing Glass-Steagall and making it illegal to regulate derivatives (making the 2008 economic meltdown inevitable)… removing media ownership rules so a handful of Rupert Murdoch’s could control 90% of what every American sees, hears, and reads, including under the banner of “news”… bailing out Wall Street while decimating the middle class… legalizing torture, indefinite detention, drone assassination, police state surveillance, domestic propaganda. We’re talking about the neocon-dominated, Mujaheddin 2.0-launching party responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Syrians… the OWS/free assembly-crushing, primary-rigging, vote-suppressing party that, in order to excuse a bungled election, revived the specter of McCarthyism, bringing the world to the brink of a HOT global war between superpowers, for the first time in generations… the party of the ICE-expanding, Border Patrol-swelling ‘Deporter in Chief’ (who separated thousands of children from their parents/legal guardians in his day, caging them as Trump has). We’re talking about the ‘We came, we saw, he died,’ Libya War party (the slave auctioneer’s and jihadi’s best friend party that expanded the GWOT to seven nations)… the party that helped Wall Street crooks erase the post-Civil Rights Era economic gains of African-American households… the party that gave lip service to climate change while freeing the polluters in deep ocean waters, the Gulf, the Arctic — all while making sure the Paris Agreement had no legally binding carbon emissions limits and polluters were given immunity… all while using the U.S. State Department to spread fracking throughout the world, privatize water, and support the Pentagon’s missions. Fascism Brand D, the party that made a Trump-like figure in the White House inevitable.”
“You and Dr. Jill Stein and Bernie Sanders and Susan Sarandon and Daniel Ellsberg and Jimmy Dore and Seymour Hersh and Chris Hedges and Caitlin Johnstone and Eva Bartlett and Glen Ford and Max Blumenthal and Medea Benjamin and Col. Ann Wright and Dr. Cornel West and Ray McGovern and Abby Martin and Ralph Nader and Vanessa Beeley and Julian Assange and Katie Halper and Aaron Mate and Rania Khalek and Briahna Joy Gray and David Swanson and Helen Buyniski and Jeremy Scahill and Eric Snowden and Glenn Greenwald and Noam Chomsky need to shut up for the rest of your lives and go away.”
“You know, I use to hear that kind of thing all the time from Republicans in the 1990s and early 2000s, back before they realized that the vast majority of the politicians they supported were bought and sold, without a principle to their name. You’ll get there. It will probably be too late, by then, to do much of anything useful with your nominally liberal impulses, in the post-petrodollar, post-empire, post-normal climate world… I only hope that me and mine (and you and yours) will have access to food, water, medicine, and shelter, in the dark days ahead, which the duopoly has condemned us to. Until then, keep ‘repudiating’ stuff.”
“I hate you. Stop talking forever.”
“Now you sound exactly like a 1990s-early 2000s Republican. At long last, a bipartisan consensus has been reached: the real enemy of the corporation-programmed duopoly voter is anyone remotely progressive.”
“Fuck off and die. I’m voting against the modern KKK and the rise of fascism.”
“I understand that, and I salute you. But you’re also voting for the party of the New Cold War… possibly a third World War. A neocon party, top to bottom, genocidally Islamophobic and maniacally Russophobic. A neo-McCarthyite, CIA-party that has risked the reputation of the American left on a conspiracy theory, with no public evidence yet offered… the party of modern Nazis.”
“I love David Frum, Rachel Maddow, Tom Friedman, Joy Ann Reid, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Vox, The New Yorker, Daily Kos, Huffington, Bill Maher, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Mike Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, the Daily Beast, Max Boot, Bill Kristol, CNN, NPR…”
“I know you do.”